


They Are Standing in the Garden

by NyxEtoile, OlivesAwl



Series: Learn to Live with the Unimaginable [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Child Loss, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Family Loss, Found Family, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Infertility, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-20 17:17:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18529600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NyxEtoile/pseuds/NyxEtoile, https://archiveofourown.org/users/OlivesAwl/pseuds/OlivesAwl
Summary: Maybe Natasha Romanov was a monster. But Auntie Nat absolutely was not.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The appearance of Clint (and his tattoos) in the last _Endgame_ trailer was surprisingly inspiring. We hammered this out as fast as we could to get it posted before the US premiere. Enjoy!
> 
> Work and series title from the song It's Quiet Uptown, from the musical _Hamilton_.

It makes everything easier. Even killing.

There was a soundness to the logic of that. Particularly in the black-or-white, right-or-wrong, us-or-them binary thinking that seemed to permeate the Red Room’s teaching. There were people that were good. And good women were mothers. There were people that were bad. Bad women were whores.

And, if they were really special, killers.

Natasha carried that. You could not do what she did—seduce men and kill them, manipulate them into giving their secrets, lie, steal, cheat, kill—and have a soul. You could not stalk, study, and execute another human being and still be a good person. And there was no way you could or should have a family without that. Family would make killing hard, or maybe impossible. 

You were a madonna, or you were whore.

Then one day, in a dark alley, she met someone like her. Someone who could stalk, study, and kill. He offered her a job instead of killing her. They were partners for years, two people with no souls. Terrible but necessary. Maybe she couldn’t be a regular person, but for once it was okay. At least she had company being alone.

They were in a safehouse Shanghai, drinking and eating dumplings and cooling down when she asked him something that she’d wondered about for a while now. “How come you’ve never tried to get in my pants?”

Clint stabbed a potsticker with one chopstick. “Don’t fish off the company pier.” He shoved it in his mouth whole.

“No. It’s not that. You don’t even think about it.” She paused. “But you do notice, so you’re not gay. If it wasn’t preposterous, I’d read you as married.”

He stopped chewing, and swallowed, and stared at her. Long enough the silence got awkward and tense. Long enough she didn’t think he was bullshitting her when he said, “I am.”

It shocked her all the same. It was an eternity, how long she stared at him, reconfirming the lack of bullshit on his face. “To who? Is it someone at SHIELD?” Why she suddenly pictured a great clandestine secret affair, she had no idea. But she could only assume it was someone like them. Who marries an assassin?

He laughed and shook his head. He got up and got his bow, and she watched as pulled out a screwdriver and carefully removed the hand grip. From inside he pulled out a small tube of paper and unrolled it, holding what turned out to be a photo of a dark haired woman, holding a little boy. “She’s a writer,” he said. Nat barely heard it, staring at the photo.

Clint had _children_.

“Nobody at SHIELD knows about them, or where they are. Except Fury. Condition of my recruitment. So this is. . . I’ve never told anyone else.”

It was an act of great trust. That was what he was trying to tell her. She could hear it, she understood, but she didn’t _care_. She stood up so fast she nearly upset the table.

“I have to go.”

He looked stunned. “What? Where?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, getting her bag and her gun. She’d find somewhere to be. She was good at that. Going AWOL was probably a fireable offense, but so what. There was plenty of contract work out there.

He got between her and the door, blocking her with his body. “What is going on here, Natasha?”

“Do you want today to be the day we find out which one of us would win in a fight? Because we can do it.”

There were a couple of tense moments where she feared she might actually have to wrestle him—she wasn’t confident of her success—before he stepped aside. He said something as she went, but she didn’t listen.

Two days later, he showed up her hotel room in Beijing, still the only person alive who could sneak up on her. “You want to talk about it?”

“What, do you have GPS on me?”

“I know how you tick.” He was stretched out on the bed, like he owned the damn thing, hands tucked behind hid head. “C’mon, Nat. What the hell?” He looked at her, then pushed up on his elbows. “Is this—I mean, you don’t think we—“

She sat in the desk chair and rolled her eyes as she began to clean her gun. She considered letting him flounder around embarrassed for a bit. “Oh for fuck’s sake, Barton. If I wanted that, a wife wouldn’t stop me. There isn’t a straight or bi man on the planet whose pants I couldn’t get into if I wanted to.”

He actually laughed. “Ok. Well?” When she didn’t respond, he let the silence hang for a bit, then said. “You’re angry.”

“Yes.” The word was a sharp sound with a hiss on the end.

“Why?”

“Because I thought you were like me,” she replied. It was supposed to come out angry, but the words ended up laced with grief.

Now Clint sat all the way up. “I don’t understand.”

She turned and looked at him finally. “We’re monsters, Clint. We kill people. On orders. For money. Maybe they’re bad people, but we execute them without trial or. . . anything. You can’t also, hey by the way, be a normal person, with a wife and kids back home.”

“Of course I can. I, you know, do.”

“Yes, well, then you’re not who I thought you were.” She began reassembling her gun. “I don’t know what the hell to do with that.”

He was quiet a while. “Do you really think you’re a monster?”

“I am what they made me. I have nothing and no one. No ties and no conscience. I can’t have any kind of family. I won’t be any good at my job.” It had been ingrained in her from childhood. So deep it was in her bones. “There are people who do this, and then there are people who have that. You can’t be both, Clint. It isn’t fair.”

“Why?”

“Because then it’s not inherent. Not required. It’s just me that’s fucked up.”

He got up off the bed, coming closer but not getting in arms reach. “Or maybe you’ve just been brainwashed. This is just another angle of control they had that I didn’t know I needed to unfuck.” He came a little closer. “You do not need to be devoid of a soul to do this job.” She looked up at him, which made him smile a little. “My childhood was terrible. Not yours, yeah, but it wasn’t pleasant. I had nobody when I met my wife. She had nobody. So we put a stake in the ground and started from scratch. There is no reason you couldn’t do the same if you wanted to.”

There was, of course, a very big reason. 

It the grand scheme of fucked up things the Red Room did to her, sterilizing her hadn’t seemed all that monumental at the time. No accidents, no necessary abortions. Easy. They hadn't told her exactly what they'd done, but they'd been very clear it was permanent and irreversible. But the further she got from them, the more she got her head straightened out, the larger it seemed to loom. As if Clint and his wife and son had begun pouring salt in a wound she hadn’t known she had.

Nat avoided meeting them as long as she could, even though he clearly wanted her to. Then he’d gotten a concussion on a mission and needed to be flown home. His farm was a secret from just about everyone, and he’d told her she was the only person he trusted with the coordinates.

“So I should tell you. . .” he started as she was setting the jet down on the landing pad outlined in the grass with gravel.

“What?” Surprises, not her thing.

“We’re having another baby,” he told her. “Like, any day now. That’s why I needed to come home so urgently.”

She turned and looked at her. “Seriously?”

“I know you don’t like babies, but—“

“No, seriously, Clint, you brought a woman who looks like me home to meet your 9-months-pregnant wife? Hi honey, sorry you feel like a whale, meet my super-hot partner from work. Who I’m totally not sleeping with.”

“I’m not,” he replied in bewilderment.

“Yes, I know that. But what would you think if you were her?”

He unbuckled and stood up. “Marriage is about trust. And we need to talk about your ego.” He inclined the door. “Now stop stalling and come inside.” 

Nat didn’t know what to make of Laura Barton, which seemed fine because Laura didn’t know what to make of her. Likely neither of them could fathom what a Russian assassin and an Iowa farm wife could possibly have in common.

But, she was friendly, and the two of them convinced Nat to stay for dinner. Over spaghetti and meatballs, she politely asked Laura what sort of things she wrote—Clint had said she was a writer. Nat was kind of picturing those romance novels with men in cowboy hats on the covers. Maybe the ones where billionaires married their secretaries after having a secret love child.

“I write horror novels,” she said cheerfully. 

Which is how she and Laura ended up on the couch until five AM—sleeping in the 3rd trimester was apparently impossible anyway—discussing the many ways you might kill someone, and the sounds various weapons made when impacting the body. When Clint and his concussion came back downstairs around dawn, they were talking about arterial spray.

What sort of woman married an assassin, indeed.

The invitation to stay a couple of days had seemed natural. The little boy, Cooper, was even kind of cute. Three days became a week, and then a week became Nat driving them to the hospital 45 minutes away because her steady-as-a-rock partner had turned into a scattered mess.

After they were taken back and Cooper dropped at their neighbor’s, Nat sat in the waiting room, because what else was she going to do? She had their car. She loitered. She napped. She bought one of Laura’s pseudonym-ed books from the gift shop and read it. Eventually Clint came out with a tiny bundle in a striped blanket.

“I don’t—I’ve never held a baby that small.” Or at all. Had she ever held a baby?

“Neither had I when Cooper was born. They’re sturdy.” This from a man who treated his bow like you could ruin it by even breathing to close to the strings. But there he was, plopping his five-minute-old baby in her arms.

The little thing opened her eyes and looked at Nat. Then she yawned and closed them, snuggling a little deeper into her blanket burrito.

And just like that, the wound opened more, and started to bleed.

*

Painkillers never made pain go away. Narcotics, anyway. That wasn’t the point. But they messed with your head, and changed your perception of the pain. Made you care less about it even if you felt it. They took the edge off.

Natasha didn't like them. Anything that altered her perception of reality too much reminded her of the Red Room. It had made some of her more severe injuries unpleasant, but even when she'd been shot she wanted off the morphine as soon as humanely possible. But she could, intellectually, see the appeal.

Clint's family, in the abstract, reminded her of the loss of something that never was. Never would be. Before a dangerous mission he'd shimmy the picture out of his bow grip and look at it, and her head turned over all sorts of things. Resentment and jealousy. Annoyance and fear that he'd be distracted. Sarcasm and superstition that every time he did so, he was upping his odds of getting killed. The gap that existed between them now. He had part of him that was fully human, but she was still just a weapon. Her feelings on the subject were neutral on a good day and dark on a bad one.

The strangest thing, though. . . In _actuality_ , the Bartons turned into a strangely effective painkiller. His house was the calmest place on earth, despite shrieking children. She slept better there, she was safe there. They did normal things and sucked her right in. She didn't know learning how to make chocolate chip cookies and sitting down to a family dinner would heal things inside her that she'd thought permanently broken, but there it was.

"Laura wants you to come home for Christmas."

They were in Burkina Faso and it was a hundred degrees out, so Nat didn't feel particularly festive. "I hate Christmas."

"I told her that. It's just that she knit you a stocking. She took up knitting and it's been a thing and now there's a stocking that says Natasha on it."

Nat didn't mention that she'd actually been the one who taught Laura to knit. She didn't think Clint knew _she_ could knit. She'd learned as part of a cover for an assassination back in the Red Room—she'd killed her target with the needle, too—but kept it up because she found it soothing. It was a deeply held secret, such an anathema to her reputation she didn't even do it in front of Clint. He thought the socks she'd given him for his birthday last year were bought on Etsy. 

"Plus, the kids will be sad. They were excited about you coming."

"Oh, sad kids." She wiped sweat off her forehead. "That's a low blow, Barton. Even for you."

"Is it working?"

"Maybe."

"There's snow on the ground," he said. "We have a cozy fireplace. Big tree. Little garlands made of popcorn."

She rolled her eyes. "Too much, man. Too much." She looked over at him. "Though maybe if you go out and chop wood with your shirt off, I might think about it." She'd been at the farm over the summer and he had been engaged in shirtless wood chopping. She and Laura had sat on the porch with lemonade and watched unabashedly. 

"Did you miss the part about snow?"

"And this is my problem how?" And the hell if she could figure out why he'd mentioned the snow like it was a good thing. Russia had been enough snow for five lifetimes.

"So? Come eat turkey and open presents." He nudged her. "We'll make cookies. I'll spike your eggnog."

"Fine, okay? Fine. Let's just go kill this guy."

So there she was a week later, staring up the path to the farmhouse in the falling snow. The porch was decked with icicle lights and she could see the tree twinkling in the window. "Why do you hate Christmas?" Clint asked as he unloaded the back of the truck. Two small suitcases and three gigantic bags of presents.

"I don't know. It makes me uncomfortable. It's a family holiday, and I have no family."

He handed her one of the bags. "You have no family. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard you say." He hoisted up the other two over his shoulders and started up the walk.

Nat had to follow him. It was cold out there.

They went around the side of the house to deposit two of the three bags in the cellar, since they were Santa gifts. She ribbed him about the Santa thing a little. . . but it was nice his kids got to have actual childhoods. 

Inside, Cooper tackled him, and waved enthusiastically at Nat before he and Clint got involved in some sort of wrestling match and/or ticklefest. Nat went into the kitchen to find Laura cutting butter into flour for pie dough, Lila careening around on the floor, penned in by baby gates.

"I'm so happy you decided to join us," Laura said. "I'll hug you when my hands aren't covered." At the gate in front of Nat, Lila was rattling the bars like a jail inmate. All she needed was a tiny tin cup. "Lila," Laura said. "Who's that?"

She looked up with her enormous toddler eyes and said, "Auntie Nat!" She beamed proudly, looked back at her mother, and then held up her arms. Nat thought it was adorable Laura had taught her daughter to say that, and obligingly picked Lila up. She nuzzled her face against Nat's neck, and without prompting, whispered, "I miss you."

Maybe, just maybe, painkillers weren't all that bad.

There was an irony she appreciated to the fact that what had made it hurt made it better. Not better. Took the edge off. Maybe being an aunt was a poor substitute for being a mother. But it wasn't _nothing_. 

A small being who trusted her. Who loved her. Who wanted to see her on Christmas morning. Who would willingly climb into her lap and settle in and fall asleep. How much of a monster could one be with little sticky fingers patting your cheeks and worming right into your heart?

Clint had no idea why she was suddenly willing—happy even—to come home after missions. He made jokes about the fresh air and about them getting old. About her developing a fondness for their goat, or if he should be scared of her friendship with Laura. 

She studied, stalked and killed. And then she washed the blood of her hands, put that part of her aside, and looked instead for the little body scrabbling down out of her daddy's arms and running towards her. _Auntie Nat._

Maybe Natasha Romanov was a monster. But Auntie Nat absolutely was not.

*

They were her family. They were the steadiest thing in her life. The dynamics shifted around. After Loki turned Clint's head inside out, she and Laura looked after him together.

When SHIELD collapsed, that was were she went, scared and shattered, and Laura and Clint looked after her. They decided to have a third baby, and wanted to name it after her. Why Clint had been so convinced it was a girl, Nat didn't know, but Nathaniel was close enough.

Lila drew her pictures and soothed her soul when the mess that was her team during the Ultron debacle showed up at the farm. She was happy Clint finally trusted everyone enough to mesh his two lives together. She had images in her head of showing them all around New York and letting the kids run around Central Park.

Instead, Clint went home for good. She missed him more than she could find words for.

The baby's middle name was in honor of a young man who's taken a hail of bullets to save Clint's life. Because he never could resist a stray, he'd brought the kid's wayward sister home with him. Laura fed her soup and the mantle sprouted a stocking labeled 'Wanda'.

Nat wasn't home enough, and she missed them. She assumed there would be time. Even after Germany, the RAFT, the breakout, and Clint's deal with the government that to this day she had _no_ idea how Tony managed to finagle. As far apart as they were, she thought there would be time to fix it. 

Then the Avengers fought the battle of their lives. And lost.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. This is going to post every day for the next week. There are a few shorter companion stories in this universe that will also post next week. Call it our pre-Endgame party.
> 
> 2\. This chapter is depressing, and I'm sorry.

Nat didn't mourn until she saw the bow.

At first the shock drowned out everything else. Everyone understood, intellectually, what had happened. They'd lost. Thanos had won. Half of every living thing was gone. Bucky, Sam, the entire Wakandan royal family. No one knew what to do.

The whole world was in shock. News stations tried to report on it, but no one who hadn't been on the field in Wakanda really knew what had happened. Various synonyms for "apocalypse" were used.

She tried to call Clint and Laura. Then Fury and Maria. In the other room she heard Steve trying to get through to Sharon and then Pepper. First there was no answer, then there was just error tones as the phone lines all over the world were overloaded with survivors doing the exact same thing.

None of them slept that night, huddled in a room, not talking. None of them knew what to say. None of them wanted to be alone.

Getting out of Wakanda was complicated and for a while that distracted her. Several countries had closed their air space, others had nowhere for people to land since their air traffic control was severely understaffed. More than a thousand planes all over the world fell out of the sky for lack of pilots.

Finally she got the right people on the phone that they were confident Rhodey could fly them back to the US without anyone trying to shoot them down. They left Wakanda still mourning their king and princess, but their presence there would do no one any good.

Steve wanted to go right back to Avengers headquarters, but Nat talked him and Rhodey into a detour, landing in a patch of lawn outside the Barton farm just before dusk.

No one came out to greet them and Nat ignored the pit that started to grow in her stomach. She ran ahead of the others, into the house that had always been warm and full of life. She knew, even as she ran from one room to another, that they weren't there.

Out in the back, on the edge of the pasture, there was a little spot where they'd had picnics. There was a basket on one of the tabled and she walked out there slowly, needing to see for herself. 

The remains of a lunch had been scattered over the table and ground, scavenged by animals and now crawling with bugs. Piles of black ash spilled over the benches. Over on one tree, a few yards away, there was a wooden target, with an arrow buried in the center. Nat walked over there slowly, as if in a dream. A nightmare, one where you felt as if the ground was sucking at your feet.

A bow lay on the ground, cushioned by more ash. It was an older, practice bow. Simple lines, easy pull. She sank down to her knees, all the emotion she'd been carefully ignoring and avoiding bubbling up. The sound that came out of her didn't sound human.

Someone came running. She could tell by the footsteps it was Steve. He stopped a half-dozen feet behind her, giving her her space.

The problem with learning how to control and play with emotions - even your own - was that sometimes there were emotions you couldn't hide from. They were too big, too strong. There was no beginning or end to what she was feeling, nothing to focus it on or channel it into.

She hadn't been prepared for all of them. Some of them, yes. She'd expected to find Clint or Laura and one of the kids. Maybe two. But not all of them. It was supposed to be half. 

She couldn't breathe. She might vomit. She was never going to be okay.

Blindly, she reached behind her for Steve. In a moment he was there, hand in hers, carefully pulling her up into a hug. He rocked her a little. "I'm so sorry."

He was sturdy and strong and good for crying on. It was all she could do. Eventually, he started to draw her away from the tree and the bench and the ash, back towards the house. Or the jet.

"Wait," she managed to get out when they reached the porch steps. She managed to detach herself from him and go inside. She was never, ever coming back here again. But a day would come she'd want something to remember them. So she went into the house and took five things, one for each of them. Then she went out to meet Steve.

"Let's go," she said softly, voice rough.

They all got back on the jet. They sat in silence, all of them, as the jet lifted off. 

Somewhere over Pennsylvania, it was Thor who finally spoke. "Do any of us have anyone left?"

"No one confirmed," Steve said quietly. "There's still a few people we haven't gotten a hold of one way or another. But. . . it's likely all we have are the other people on this jet."

"Then we should stay together," Bruce said. "Figure out how to survive."

Steve met Nat's eyes, and she felt like he was talking to her. "We should."

She looked down at the little stuffed cat she'd taken from Nate's room. It hadn't fit in any of her pockets. Running her thumb over one plastic eye, she nodded and looked back at Steve. "We should."

Rhodey flew them back to the Avengers compound, which was a ghost town. The people who worked there, if they hadn't dusted, had likely all left. Everyone, the world over, was searching for loved ones.

The compound wasn't entirely empty. Pepper seemed to have made her way there, and she came out to meet the jet. She and Rhodey had some sort of unspoken conversation—probably both hoping the other had Tony—and then shared a crying hug not unlike her and Steve's.

"Fury and Maria both disintegrated," she told them, once everyone had gotten inside. She made them all coffee, perhaps out of a desire to do something with her hands. Pepper was generally the most put-together and polished person Nat knew, and right now her nails were all bitten down to the quick. "I talked to Tony when he was on the spaceship, and then I called Fury hoping he'd have a better explanation about what the hell happened. They came to see me in the city, and I was with them when _it_ happened." She looked at them. "What _was_ that?"

They took turns telling the story, about Thanos and the stones and the battle in Wakanda. It was hard to get through, and having the others there to take over or fill in gaps helped. The talking raccoon that Thor had picked up took a few minutes of explaining all on his own. Though he did, apparently, like coffee.

"Manhattan is one giant car accident," Pepper said. "It's chaos. So was the Thruway coming up—I took a suit, there was no way to drive. Miles and miles of huge pileup accidents. He killed even more people than he meant to."

"Yeah," Steve said, blowing out a breath.

"I shut down Stark Industries for the week or more. I don't know what the protocol for apocalypse is. I came up here because I was hoping to find what of you that survived."

"This is it," Bruce said.

Pepper looked from one to the other of them. "What are we going to do?"

There was an awful moment of silence that answered her more than any words could.

She got up without saying anything, then came back a moment later. She set what looked like an old-school pager on the table. The screen was lit up, but instead of black-and-white it had a colorful, rather patriotic-looking image. "The last thing Fury did was rather franticly turn this on. FRIDAY scanned it, it's putting out what is apparently a very long range signal."

Bruce put his glasses on, going over to look at the pager. He picked up, turning it over in his head. "This has been. . . heavily modified. With tech I don't recognize." He looked over at Steve. "I'm going to take this down to the lab, see if I can amp up the signal."

"Gimme it," Rocket said. "There's a lot of tech you won't recognize because this is a dumb planet."

Looking amusingly insulted, Bruce handed it over. Rocket turned it over in his hands a moment, muttering under his breath. "This is Kree," he said, poking once of the nodules. "Maybe a decade or two old. The hell were Kree doing on this backwater?"

"Looking for the Tesseract?" Thor offered.

"Do you recognize the symbol?" Nat asked him. "Pagers of that era aren't typically capable of bright colors."

He shook his head. "Not anything I've ever seen. You're probably right about wanting to increase the signal. Tech this old and small, it's gonna give out long before anyone on an inhabited planet hears it."

"If it was worth Fury trying with his last action," Steve said. "It's worth us trying."

"Come on," Bruce told Rocket. "I'll show you the lab. You can mock our ignorance and help me cobble together an antenna."

The pager, as it turned out, summoned a woman who said she was human, but had powers that made Wanda Maximoff look weak. 

"He has to be stopped," Carol said, like it was the easiest and most obvious thing. "Someone with that kind of power can't be loose in the universe."

"The glove was badly damaged," Thor said. "He might not be able to use it. Or at least not at full capacity."

"All the more reason to hunt him down."

"That's suicide," Steve said. "And I'm a man usually fond of Last Stands."

"You didn't have me before," Carol replied. "And I'm indestructible."

Bruce's eyebrows went up. "Define 'indestructible'."

"I've been inside the sun."

There was a beat of silence. "That sounds pretty indestructible to me," Nat offered.

"We'd need a way to find him," Steve said. "And a way to get there."

Thor heaved out a slow sigh. "If you can find him, Stormbreaker can summon the bifrost."

"Well, that's half our problems solved."

Bruce looked down at Rocket. "Any idea where a megalomanic would go after conquering the universe?"

"No," he said. "But if we could get some better comms going, maybe we could find him. Guy don't walk softly, you know?"

He nodded and looked over at Carol. "You upgraded Fury's pager?" She nodded. "Think you could help us rig up some interplanetary communication?"

"Worth a shot," she said. "Let me take a look at what you have."

They headed downstairs to the labs, with Thor in tow in case he could be of use, leaving the rest of them at loose ends. Rhodey and Pepper went to the offices, making more in a line of endless phone calls. It left Nat and Steve alone in the meeting room.

After a few beats of silence, she said, "Do you think there's any chance?"

"There's always a chance," he said immediately. Almost reflexively. Then he looked up at her for a long moment. "I've always expected to die with my boots on."

She sighed softly, looking out the window a moment. "I suppose I did too." Though there had been moments - brief and lovely - when she'd thought maybe there was another way.

They got some kind of fancy antenna set up hooked up, based on what Bruce had used to amp the pager's signal. Rocket scanned scanned for the frequency of his ship first. "Hey, maybe some of them survived." He clearly didn't expect it. They all assumed that Titan had killed them all before coming to earth for the final stone.

What no one had expected was a message from Tony, explaining how they were adrift in space and running out of oxygen.

There was a beat of silence after the message ended. "Carol--" Steve started.

"Low power transmission," Rocket said before she could reply. "At least a week old."

That sunk in, and then Rhodey said quietly, "I'm going to go find Pepper."

"Do you want me to come?" Nat asked. The men often liked her to be on hand for tears.

He shook his head. "She and I have done this before."

Insomnia got the better of her that night. She swore she could feel Nate's stuffed cat staring at her. But she couldn't possibly put it away. 

It was a common condition these days. There was always some or other roaming the halls if she got up in the middle of the night. Thor and Carol clearly needed less sleep. Steve's dreams haunted him as much hers did. 

When she went downstairs to make herself some herbal tea, she could see Pepper sitting out on the deck off the common room—despite the temperature. Nat detoured to the fridge, deciding this was a cause for the bottle of vodka she kept in the back of the freezer.

She grabbed a blanket off the back of the couch on her way, letting herself out on the deck. Pepper didn't look up until Nat settled in the chaise next to her and offered her the bottle.

Pepper stared at it a moment before taking it. She did at least have her own blanket over her legs. "Does it really matter if someone you thought was dead just turns out to have died a little later?"

Nat shrugged, looking up at the stars. "I don't know. Maybe. As someone who has thought a lot about my own death. . . how and when it happens matters."

"Is starving and dehydrating and suffocating better than dying in battle?"

"Suffocation is a pretty peaceful death." Pepper handed the vodka back and Nat took a swig. "You fall asleep long before you die. I'd prefer it over bleeding out from wounds."

"I guess that's something." She took the bottle back. "I talked to him when he was on the ship. Mostly I yelled at him. That's the last thing I said."

"About him dying?"

"About him being on the ship." She shook her head. "Soon as I saw it. . ."

"Steve and I were talking today. About knowing we'd die with our boots on." Nat held her hand out for the bottle. "I've had a few moments when I thought maybe, just maybe, I could die in my sleep with grey hair. But I've been on this path since I was a little girl. Once you're on it. . . maybe it's impossible to get off."

"I suppose he's always been on that path. Once Iron Man started, anyway."

"Much as he might have wanted to get off. Yeah." She took a long, harsh drink. "We don't always get to choose."

"A whole lot of things don't happen how they are supposed to." Nat held out the bottle and she shook her head. "For example. I should not be drinking that."

"More of a whiskey woman?" Pepper gave her a look and she felt her eyes widen. "Oh shit, are you-?"

A single nod. "I am 42 years old. If I believed in God, I'd think he was laughing at me."

"Jesus." She put the bottle down on the ground, away from Pepper, then stood and leaned over to hug her. "Congratulations anyway."

"I hope you guys take that purple bastard's head off."

"Thor has a really big axe that can do the job." She sat back down and reached for her vodka. "And if we make it back, I have a lot of experience as an auntie."

*

Time and time again, any being that got great power let it get to them. Steve made the comment that it had been the basic principle behind Erskine's choice of him to receive the serum. Even if Thanos had thought himself great, and noble, and on the side of good—not that he ever was—the siren song of power stronger than he could wield eventually called to him.

It made him easy to find. 

It would have been nice to say they destroyed him. But mostly he destroyed himself, they were just the final stroke. But he was weak enough he couldn't control the stones, and whatever kind of otherworldly energy energy that came from Carol's hands and Thor's hammer bent his power right back on him.

None of them expected he would explode, and leave no trace of the stones behind.

Nat and Steve scoured the area awhile, before even they had to admit that not even a twisted shred of the gauntlet was there. It was a whole new level of grief, really. Before there had been hope. Defeat Thanos, get the glove, undo everything. And now. . . there was nothing.

Returning to the others, Steve told Thor to take them home.


	3. Chapter 3

The bifrost burned a pattern in the grass. Nat looked at it for a moment, before they began trudging towards the compound. No one said a word. They were alone together in their loss. They'd won, and it felt like failure.

"Steve!" Nat looked up at the sound of the familiar voice, and saw Sharon running down the lawn.

He stared for a moment, looking utterly frozen. Then his shield feel from his hand and he started running, meeting her halfway and scooping her up in a hug worthy of an old Hollywood movie.

She'd been in hiding with them after the fight in Germany. She and Steve had taken up, and when they were in a mood, Nat and Sam had grumped occasionally to each other that their relationship was why Steve tolerated Wanda galavanting about the globe for the sake of romance.

Nat would never see Sam or Wanda again. 

Sharon had gone to visit her family the day they'd flown to Scotland to find Wanda and Vision. When she couldn't be reached after the battle, or any of the time after, that they'd all assumed Sharon had disintegrated.

But now here she was, hanging onto Steve's neck, the two of them crying. Nat wanted to be happy for him, for them. But she had a limit and this day had reached it. So she walked past them and into the house.

Pepper came to her room with ice cream a little while later. "I hate them a little bit, does that make me a terrible person?"

"If it does, I'm right there with you." She took the spoon Pepper offered and dug into the carton. "Steve deserves happiness. Most of the time I believe that. But it feels a little like. . . we were all in a hole and somehow he gets to climb out."

"His hole is pretty deep. I don't know if he'll reach the rim." She looked at Nat. "I'm going to have to pull myself. But I give you permission to hate me a little, too."

She waved a hand, not really sure what to say. "I guess it doesn't do any good to compare pain. None of us got off without a scratch."

Sharon was her friend, and in the end Nat was glad to see her. They all needed all the people they could get. They all had to face the future now. There was no going back.

Carol told them she had people to look for, and left the next day. The rest of them stayed in the compound, and tried to figure out how to start over.

Spring inched closer to summer, the temperatures getting ever warmer. "I want to plant a garden," Nat said at dinner one night. They all ate together, as much as they could. Made it feel more like a family.

"Flowers or vegetables?" Steve asked, while he slathered his string beans with more butter. Steve put too much butter on everything.

"Either. Both. I'll plant what I can and see what sticks. I've never tried to grow anything before."

"I vote for vegetables," Thor said. "Maybe if we grow enough, you all will stop putting fungus in my food."

"Hey, I told you I made the mushrooms big enough to pick out," Bruce said. "Everyone else likes them. Even the pregnant lady. And I've seen her dip oreos in ketchup."

"That was one time!"

"You could just man up and eat the mushrooms," Rocket said. 

"I will, the day you eat a piece of fruit."

"Your Earth fruit is weird and you all need to accept that."

They were a strange little family. But a family nonetheless. "Maybe I'll start with herbs."

Rocket leaned back. "I think I hear the comms shit beeping. Probably Carol. I'll be back, nobody steal my food."

"Do not sneak fruit on his plate," Nat warned Thor when he was gone.

"You are no fun." He paused. "Can I plant some flowers?" 

She smiled. "Of course. The more the merrier."

Rocket came back into the dining room. "Everybody outside," he said.

In one motion, they all stood up from the table. "What's wrong?" Steve asked as they headed for the door.

"Nothing, there's just some shit outside you need to see." He made a shooing motion. "Go, go."

They all went out on the grass, and there was absolutely nothing to see. Rocket was looking up, so they all looked up. It was cloudy and you couldn't even see stars. Crickets chirped.

"Is this a prank?" Thor asked.

"Are we all standing out here to wait for Carol?" Steve asked. "Because we really don't need to."

"Have some fucking patience," Rocket replied.

"You have five months to get the cursing under control," Pepper said. "Or I'm buying you a muzzle."

"Lady, that kid will not mind my mouth in return for for what it's about to get."

"And what, exactly, is that?"

The clouds began to glow, and then the shape of a ship formed, becoming more distinct as it descended. Sounding very proud, Rocket said, "A Dad."

Pepper's head whipped around to stare at the ship as it settled almost daintily on the grass. "Oh, my God."

"Stark is in that?" Steve asked.

Rocket nodded. "That guy's luck is more impressive than Quill's was."

The back gate of the plane opened, and there were a bunch of unfamiliar looking people who got off. The sound of Thor's gasp surprised Nat, and she turned and looked at him. He had genuine awe on his face. "They're Asgardian."

A woman came through the crowd and off the ramp, in full armor and a cape. "A rescue ship came and you got on and left! You told me to get people into escape pods, and I did, and then you just leave?" 

The group of them parted and stepped aside because if she was going to punch him, no one wanted to be in the way.

Thor, for his part, looked delighted. "Valkyrie! You're alive. I can't believe you made it here."

"No thanks to you!" she replied. But she let him hug her so hard he lifted her up. 

"You can be mad at me all you want," he told her, "I'm just happy you're here."

"Three months you've been ranting about him and that's it? I was promised a show."

Now there was a voice Nat had thought she'd never hear again. They all turned to see Stark walking across the lawn. Pepper shrieked and went running to him, knocking him back with the force of her hug. He let her go only to hug Rhodey and Bruce, and then came forward until he stopped in front of Nat and Steve.

There was a long, heavy silence in which he and Steve stared at each other. "It's good to see you," Steve finally said.

His mouth quirked into an almost smile. "You too, Steve." He stuck out a hand. "Thanks for holding down the fort."

Steve replied with a full grin, and shook his hand.

You make a family with what you have.

*

Time marched on. Nat started her garden, with help from Thor and, surprisingly, Bruce. Everyone resisted the green-thumb jokes.

Tony's return was met with general celebration, both in their group and nation wide. Society was slowly rebuilding itself and Stark Industries reopened as a manufacturer of automation and domestic machinery. With half the population gone, the issue of overcrowding was solved, but now there wasn't a sufficient work force to keep everything running. Tony was good at solving problems, and this was a problem he could solve.

Summer turned to fall, Pepper grew bigger. Sharon announced there would be a second baby in the spring. Nat tucked that little bit of grief in with all the rest she carried, and celebrated her first harvest of peas and lettuce.

People with a criminal inclination tended to take advantage of times of chaos, and at the moment help with law enforcement was greatly needed. Whatever sins the Avengers had committed, they all seemed forgiven, as long as they provided assistance when asked. It probably helped that Secretary Ross had perished in the snap.

Steve took to running a support group for survivors. He told her it was an homage to Sam.

They built housing on their land to house the Asgardians. A number of them came to work for the Avengers, so they had multiple teams. It didn't take much skill or training to handle routine things when you were mostly indestructible. 

Nat and Steve took turns monitoring the comms for help requests. There had been chatter for a few weeks about a very proficient assassin working in Japan. She'd been keeping an eye on it, but nothing useful had been gleaned about the guy. It smacked of old school cloak and dagger and a part of her just wanted to go to Japan for a few weeks and hunt. Get away from the old memories and new happiness that bogged her down.

"You should find some crime somewhere tropical," Steve muttered when she mention it. They were socked in with the season's first big snow. It was still fall, but this was upstate New York. Up until the weather turned, the garden had kept her busy. Now the ground was frozen, and all she had was potted herbs in the kitchen window.

Steve didn't like the cold.

"It's seventy in Tokyo today," she told him, snipping off a few basil leaves to add to her pasta sauce.

"You'll miss Thanksgiving," he replied. They were having a big dinner. The Asgardians were excited.

She wondered which would be worse, being there with all the happy couples and families, or being alone in a different city. Her missing it would probably make some of the others sad. "I did promise to make my famous sweet potato custard."

"Thor is trying to convince Rocket that sweet potatoes are fruit."

The sound of raised voices approaching the kitchen reached them. "It's not a blizzard, it's just snow. And even if it was, it would be even less safe to fly."

"Flying is faster!"

"We are not taking a jet! I will leave you here and go get Steve." Pepper appeared in the doorway. "Hi," she said. "I think we're gonna miss dinner."

Steve's brows went up. "Oh? Is something up?

Nat took one look at Pepper leaning on the doorframe and clutching her belly and sighed. "Seriously Steve?"

"Oh." He blinked a few times. "Maybe we should take the jet."

"Thank you!" Tony called from the hallway.

Nat sighed, shaking her head. "I'll go get the car." She certainly wasn't going to Japan today.

A baby girl was born the following afternoon. They named her Morgan, and she had a head full of red curls. She spent Thanksgiving dinner dozing on her mothers chest, nestled in a wrap that Nat had given Pepper as a gift. Laura had worn all her babies—Lila had bad colic and wouldn't sleep any other way—so Nat knew how to tie one on. She’d had a selection of different kinds, including one made out of camo that Clint used.

Nat still could not, all these years later, comprehend why Laura had trusted her enough to tie her very small baby to her body, but it made her feel, for the first time, that she might truly be a person and not just the weapon they made.

Everyone pulled in to take care of the baby, even Rocket, who made her a mobile out of metal and wires what twirled around itself in patterns that even the adults found fascinating. Nat took her share of night shifts, pacing around the compound and telling Morgan stories of the aunts and uncles she'd never get to meet.

Christmas came, which was the hardest holiday so far. Her Christmases had always been spent at the Bartons. Woken up before sunrise by shrieking kids. Sipping coffee on the couch while they tore into presents. Morgan was too little to do more than her usual dawn wake up, and the rest of them we all feeling losses. But they managed a big dinner and presents for everyone. She ended the day sitting alone and watching the snow fall outside.

The winter was long, and dark, and cold, but it did end. The snow melted and the ground thawed, and tiny crocuses popped up outside. Nat monopolized a corner of the big hangar—it had a lot of glass—to start her seedlings in pots while waiting for the last frost.

Not unlike his father's conveniently patriotic birthday, James Wilson Rogers made his debut on the exact one-year anniversary of the snap. The whole lot of them used it as an excuse to not participate in any of the events and memorials and commemorations happening all over the world.

March became April, which brought a brief cold snap that did nothing for Nat's growing restlessness. May brought the sun and she spent as much time as she could outside, preparing the ground for planting and making plans to expand the garden.

They'd hired some people to help them manage scheduling and intel monitoring. One of them flagged reports about the Japanese assassin again, and sent them up to her. He'd made some news because he'd decapitated a high level Yakuza boss. There was scanty intel, mostly because he apparently was doing some sort of Robin Hood thing where he protected local businesses from the gangs, and absolutely nobody would give him up.

The Tokyo police seemed have only 3 pieces of information—that he was gaijin, that he inexplicably fought with a katana, and he had tattoos. Oh, and a photo of his arm, taken by a security camera when he reached up to disconnect it. 

Said photograph was attached to the file that ended up on Nat's desk. After skimming through the descriptions of his last two exploits she came to it, turning it sideways to read the series of numbers that crossed his wrist. At first she thought they were coordinates of some sort. Then it occurred to her they were birthdates. Children's birthdates, based on the year.

Chills traced up her spine and she was up and moving before she even realized it.

She found Steve in the common room, reading while James had tummy time. "I need to go to Japan," she said without preamble.

He looked up in surprise. "Okay?"

"I'm going to leave tonight. I don't know how long I'll be gone."

He frowned at her. "Nat, you look like you've seen a ghost."

She didn't want to say it out loud. It felt like jinxing it. But she held out the photo and pointed to the numbers. "I know those dates."

"This is someone you know?"

Taking a deep, steadying breath, she said, "I think this is Clint."

Steve looked up sharply. "I thought he dusted?"

"So did I." On very bad night she still dreamed about that bow cushioned by a pile of ash. "But those are the dates of his children's birthdays. That's. . . I don't know what the odds are of that being a coincidence."

"If you want to go check it out, I support you. Just. . .don't get your hopes too high."

That was probably the best she was going to get. "I'll let you know what I find."

She was on a flight to Tokyo in the morning.


	4. Chapter 4

As part of his house arrest, the government had taken all the firearms out of Clint's house. They'd taken all his bows, too, because they weren't stupid. Or, maybe they were. Because you could buy bows from Walmart without having to so much as tell them your name. 

The feds watching him hadn't complained about it when Laura went and bought one. It wasn't for him, anyway. It was for Lila.

It was the only reason he was still alive. You can't shoot yourself with a bow. Not even Hawkeye could figure that out. He had not touched one since. Bow or gun. You could kill people just fine without one, as it turned out. 

It was a grim hobby. But he'd lost all the things that made him human anyway.

In times of chaos, bad men often prospered. Consolidate power, take advantage of the lack of a legal system. It was a scenario that had happened dozens of times, maybe hundreds, over the course of history. When Clint had worked for SHEILD, long before aliens and monsters had complicated everything, it had been his job to deal with such men. He had been good at it.

Seemed to make sense to go back to basics.

Japan was often rainy in the early summer, and muggy and humid when it wasn't. He didn't mind the rain. The sound of it covered his footsteps and the wet made people huddle up. Everyone was in a hurry to get out of the rain, no one looked behind them. Not even yakuza enforcers walking through a neighborhood full of people they'd taken advantage of.

There were more of them than expected. He didn't like leaving a pile of bodies in the street. One thing he really missed about SHIELD was that you could call for clean-up if you needed it.

It had been easier a few months back, before the police force had really solidified. The shop keeps were all on his side at least, and sometimes willing help get their hands dirty in the aftermath.

He was scanning the block, looking for a good spot to tuck them away, when he heard a very soft footstep behind him. He tensed, wondering if he was about to add to the pile, when a quiet voice said, "Clint?"

That voice he'd know anywhere. But he stood still a moment, then he wiped the blood off his sword on the leather of his jacket, and put it in its sheath. Then he pulled his mask off and turned to look at her.

She was standing a few feet away, under an umbrella, wrapped in a tan rain coat. Her hair was puled back in a braid, the end an incongruous blonde. And she was staring at him like he was a ghost.

He supposed he was.

Slowly, he walked towards her, stopping close enough to touch her but not doing so. He hadn't wanted to know if she hadn't survived. He'd already been at his limit. But here she was. "Natasha."

"Hi," she said quietly. He saw her throat work. "It's really good to see you."

"How did you find me?"

"We've been tracking you, but didn't know. . . Last week, you dismantled a camera, but it caught a picture of you arm." She gestured, looking sad. "I recognize the dates."

He put his hand over the spot where the tattoos were. "They're all gone," he whispered.

Her mouth trembled and she nodded. "I went to the farm. I saw. I'm so sorry."

There wasn't really much to say. Nothing would ever make it ok. But it had been a year since he'd touched anyone in kindness, and he found himself reaching for her hand. She met him, curling her fingers around his, a gentle pressure through his thick glove.  
For a few moments they stood there, silently holding hands. Then Nat cleared her throat. "Do you need help with that mess you made?"

He felt the very beginnings of what might almost be a smile. "I wouldn't say no."

She helped him stash the bodies in the back of an alley, then coaxed him into coming back to her hotel. It was far nicer than the small apartment he'd been staying in. But sitting on the edge of the bed and watching her peel off her soaked rain coat, he felt very out of place.

"We've been staying at the compound. In New York," she told him, grabbing a towel from the bathroom to dry her hair. "The team. Well, those of us who are left." She offered him a towel as well.

He took his jacket off because it felt weird not to. Then he took the towel from her to dry his hair. "Who's left?"

"Steve, Tony, Rhodey, Thor, Bruce. Pepper and Sharon Carter are there." She paused and he could sense there was something she didn't want to say. "The Starks and Rogers have babies. And there's a bunch of Asgardians and two aliens that Thor picked up somewhere."

He nodded once. "Baby Stark made the news even here."

"Yeah. She was pretty popular." She sat on one of the spindle chairs near the bed. After studying him a moment, she said softly, "You could come back with me. If you wanted."

"Is that what you came here for? To get me?"

"I don't. . . I don't know. Mostly I just wanted to see if it was really you. I hadn't thought much past that." She looked down at the towel that she was now twisting in her hands. "I started a garden."

That made him smile. He'd loved growing things. Making things. All he did now was destroy. "What do you have in it?."

"I have herbs in the kitchen window. The ground finally thawed, so I moved my seedlings out of the hanger. The peas and leafy greens are doing well, but the fennel and broccoli look sad." She stretched her legs out. "I want to try squash later in the summer. And maybe start a berry patch." Natasha has always loved berry picking.

"Squash is hearty, even up in the cold." He lifted his head to look at her. "Sounds like you could use some help, though."

She nodded and lifted a shoulder. "Thor tries sometimes but he's no more of a gardener than I am. I'd like to expand the garden, maybe try some more serious plants. But it's hard."

For a moment he just watched her. She was so tense, her shoulders hunched a little, misery nearly radiating from her. He'd seen it before, once. When he'd looked into the eyes of his target and found someone worth saving.

And now she was grieving for the same people he was. She was the only one left who remembered them. Who cared they were gone.

He stood up, and he walked over to her, and he held out his arms.

With a harsh sound, she stood and wrapped her arms around him, hugging him fiercely. He felt tears in his eyes, and realized he hadn't cried since the day he'd left the farm. Numb and cold felt easier.

"I missed you so much," she whispered into his shirt.

"I missed you," he said in reply. She was all he had left now.

"I understand if you don't want to come. But. . . it's nice. It's like having a family. Maybe not the one you want but. . . It's good not to be alone."

He sighed. "If I'm not going to die, I guess I should figure out how to live."

She rubbed his back. "We're all figuring it out."

*

They took a commercial flight home. Clint wore a t-shirt, and Nat found herself studying the tattoos that covered his left arm. Some seemed decorative, but she could see those that were about part of his life. 

In the design on his forearm, she could see a black widow spider.

Unable to resist, she reached over and touched it with a finger tip. When he glanced over at her, she offered a faint smile.

"Well. You know. I thought you were dead," he said.

The smile widened a little and she nodded. "I like it."

He extended his footrest and reclined his seat. They were in business class, because it was a long flight, and Pepper had paid for the tickets. "Do they know you're bringing me back?"

"I told Steve," she relied. "I'm sure he's passed the news around."

"Do they know what I was doing?"

Nat paused, considering. "Steve and Sharon do. None of the others keep tabs on the criminal activity reports. So unless they told them, I don't think so."

He shook his head. "I don't know why I asked that. It's not like it's not my profession."

She had a couple ideas, but this probably wasn't the place to get into it. "Everyone is going to be thrilled to see you."

"I take it Steve and Tony are on speaking terms?"

"End of the world tends to put things in perspective." If she was honest, they were probably better friends now then they had been before. There was a lot less bickering and a lot more exchanging dad stories.

Clint had a lot of Dad stories. But she doubted he wanted to tell them. Or hear anybody else's.

They landed in New York City, and drove up. She drove, like she always did. He watched the scenery in silence. She'd worry about silence coming from anyone else.

The gates were closed, since she hadn't been entirely sure which flight they would get. She punched in her code, waved at the camera and drove up to the main building. She could see Steve, Tony, and Thor in front, waiting to greet them.

"Ready?" she asked Clint, parking by the building.

"I see they've set up a receiving line."

"Remember, shake with the right, hug with the left and slap 'em three times on the back to make it manly."

He shook his head, opening the car door to get out. He walked up ahead of her, and she fought the urge to hover. To make sure no one started showing him baby pictures, or asking inappropriate questions.

So she made a point of stopping and getting her bag out of the back seat before headed up to the house. When she got close enough, she heard Thor enthusiastically discussing the garden, which was probably the best possible topic to take over the conversation.

"Once I get settled, I'll come take a look at it," Clint said. 

"Your input would be most welcome."

Tony stepped back, pulling the door open. "Come on, we have a room for you."

Bruce and Rhodey came to meet him inside, as did Valkyrie and eventually Rocket—who she hadn't explained and then had to. There was no sign of Sharon or Pepper, and after a moment she realized why—they were keeping the babies away.

She didn't remember the last time she'd ever felt such intense gratitude. Making a mental note to give them both hugs the next time she saw them, she touched Clint's arm and lead him to the wing with the bedrooms.

They'd given him the one across the hall from her, with a view of the trees beyond the property. None of the rooms had a view of the front and the road, but this was definitely the one with the best view of the back property line.

"Good sightlines," he said approvingly.

"If you look down to the right you might be able to see the garden," she commented. "Bruce is on your left. I'm across the hall."

"I can in fact see your sad broccoli from here."

"It's not impossible someone here is sabotaging it."

He looked at her over his shoulder. "We'll see about that."

The man knew his way around plants, she'd give him that. One of his many incongruous traits, the ones nobody who knew him at SHIELD would have ever believed. He told her he felt good getting his hands in the dirt again, and the garden flourished.

Clint took a liking to the babies, when he finally met them. Nat hadn't been sure if they would upset him, but she supposed it was much like Auntie-is-better-than-nothing idea. Laura used to say he was a nap whisperer, because no matter how fussy or sick the kids might be, he could always, always get them to go to sleep. His magic worked on Morgan and Jamie, too.

She hadn't entirely known what to expect, bringing him home. Possibly that he'd only last a week or two and then disappear, chaffing at the domesticity they'd managed to cobble together here. But instead, he stayed, slipping into the rhythms of the house easily, like a piece none of them knew had been missing.

It was nice, on a purely selfish level, to have him there. Her moments of feeling alone in a crowded house grew fewer and far between. He was always willing to chat or share a drink with her, no questions asked. Even if he did often have a baby laying on his chest while he did so.

The one thing he would _not_ do, at all, was go into the field with them. She didn't know what to make of that.

They didn't talk about Laura or the kids, except in vague, sideways ways. He hadn't seen her shelf with the mementos she'd taken from the farm. It occurred to her she should probably tell him about them, see if he wanted to have them, but all her instincts told her the wound was too fresh and he wasn't there yet. So she said nothing and went at his pace.

Summer came and her vegetable crop was ten times better than it would have been without him. He helped her plant squash and potatoes and some pumpkins she hoped would be ready for Halloween. Time out in the garden with him was her favorite time of day. Both of them kneeling among the green shoots, hands filthy. She wore an enormous hat and half a bottle of sunscreen, to his amusement. He. . . didn't wear a shirt most of the time.

The tattoos on his left arm sprawled up his shoulder onto his back. She told herself the tattoos were why she stared.

She had told him once, when she was younger and angrier and still draining out the poison the Red Room had put in her, that if she wanted him, a wife wouldn't have stopped her. At the time, she hadn't met Laura yet, and it had more or less been true. She had wanted him, in a strange confusing way that she had later realized was her first crush. He had been the first man she'd found appealing. No job, no ulterior motive. Just good old fashioned hormones and personal taste.

Meeting Laura and the kids - becoming Auntie Nat - hadn't exactly _killed_ the crush. But it had given her the tools to close it off somewhere it wouldn't bother her too much. And the friendship and partnership she had gotten instead was better than any fling or affair she might have instigated.

So, yes, it was just the tattoos that made her stare.

"So I was talking to some of the guys," he said one afternoon. "We think we should build you a greenhouse."

Leaning back to stretch her back, she squinted at the sun to try to gauge the time. "I know Rhodey and Tony are tired of me taking up space in the hanger with my seedlings."

"Not just for seedlings. But enough space to grow in the winter. And/or grow things that the climate up here won't tolerate. Stuff that's harder to get." One of the outcomes of cutting the population in half was that it was nearly impossible to find people to do backbreaking labor for next to nothing, and produce that didn't take well to machine harvesting was either rare, expensive as hell, or both. 

"I certainly wouldn't say no. How big a building are you thinking?"

"I don't know." He surveyed the garden, which was twice the size as last year. "Poll the inmates and see what they long for most."

She did so, and got a hilariously wide array of answers. Some were impossible - she didn't think even a Stark built green house was going to be able to handle tropical fruit like bananas. But most of them were doable. Tony was craving fresh tomatoes. Pepper was apparently willing to sell her soul for a melon. Rhodey longed for some spicy peppers. Steve and Sharon would be happy with any kind of fruit. Rocket had some sort of weird space tuber he insisted was delicious. She agreed to stick it in one corner and see what happened.

What had started out as a hobby to keep her hands busy became a full-time project that roped in almost everyone else. Nat did extensive research, finding a few fruit trees that would do well in their climate, mostly apples that required a frost for ripening. It would take several years to get a good crop, but it would be worth it.

In the mean time, Clint and the other men cleared a large plot of land halfway between the woods and the house and started setting up her green house.

Clint had originally intended to build something with simple framing and plastic. It had grown quite a bit, but she was still surprised when she and Sharon came back from a trip to DC for government meetings to find Tony and Rhodey in their suits, hoisting a big steel i-beam over the top of the house. 

Pepper came out onto the porch as they approached. "I need to know who told him he couldn't build a greenhouse that would grow bananas." 

Nat sighed. "It was an offhand comment, not a challenge."

"Apparently bananas were grown in a hothouse in England in 1830." She repeated it like she's heard it many times.

Accepting the fact she was now going to have to grow bananas, she sighed, "Fine, but I'm planting them in the corner with Rocket's space squash and he can deal with any repercussions." Of course, this opened up the possibility for a lot of other things she'd crossed off her list. Now all she needed was to find an avocado pit.

It ended up looking more like the Crystal Palace than the backyard greenhouse she'd been picturing. It was beautiful, and amazingly over-engineered. There were different zones inside, so she could have different temperature and humidity levels--which could be monitored and controlled, along with a million other things, by a computer system that included FRIDAY. She could even play her plants music.

Its distinctly Victorian appearance had nothing of the rest of the compound's sleek, sharp modernism--which were Tony's tastes. It was instead clearly created by a man who'd spent a decade restoring a century-old farmhouse.

The pumpkins were fading from green to orange when it was finally ready. Nat refused to admit she was a little intimidated by the fuss and set about planting. A section for tropical fruits, another for more moderate climate trees. A corner with every melon she could get seeds for, growing on mounds so their vines could trail down happily. And a tiny section that was reserved for food from other planets. The Asgardians had had a collection of seeds and Nat obligingly planted them along with Rocket's and hoped she didn't walk into tentacles one day.

The largest section she grew what she thought of as the more mundane foods. Lettuce and other greens flourished on ground level. In hanging beds she had tomatoes, peppers, herbs and other cooking vegetables so they could have fresh meals all year long.  
Even with Clint and periodic help from the others, it took most of the fall to get everything sorted and planted. She took to going seed hunting whenever she traveled anywhere, which is how she found her melon seeds and a coveted avocado pit.

"What's next?" Pepper asked as they toasted pumpkin seeds. Tony, Steve and the others were carving pumpkins for a mostly uninterested Morgan and James. Morgan did seem to like the gooey pumpkin guts.

"I don't know," she admitted. "I suppose I could go full pioneer and start drying and canning things."

"That's really in now," Sharon said. "Jam would be yummy."

"When the berries start to ripen I'll look into it."

She mentioned it to Clint later that night, and was surprised he replied, "Laura used to can things."

"Huh." She thought back a moment, then admitted, "I'd forgotten that."

"I used to think choosing not to remember the little details would help, but it never did."

Watching him pace with a fussy James, she said, "Forgetting can't be a choice. Your mind chooses what to let go of."

"And what you see in your dreams for the rest of your life."

"Dreams fade, too," she told him. "Eventually."

He looked down at the baby for a moment. "I don't know if I want them to."

"That's a different problem, then."

He exhaled slowly. "If I forget them, then they'll really be gone, won't they?"

Her heart broke for him, but it was probably a good sign he was finally talking. 

"I remember them. But. . . yes. At this point memories are the only things we have. Memories and the stories we tell to others."

"I don't talk about them because I don't wan't people's pity." James had quieted down enough Nat thought he might be asleep. He was at least calm enough that Clint sat across from her.

"Everyone lost someone. Most of more than one. I don't think you'll find pity."

"It is not the same," he said, harsh and angry.

His tone made James stir and for a moment they were both silent, waiting for him to resettle. "No," Nat said finally, voice soft. "It's not. And no one is going to pretend we know what it's like for you. But the fact is we're all grieving, on one way or another. And there's something to be said for sharing that grief. That's why we're all still here."

Clint closed his eyes. "I shouldn't have brought it up."

She stifled a sigh, reminding herself he had to go at his own pace. They'd all processed differently. And he was right, he had a particular loss that none of them understood.

"It's late," she said, standing. "I should sleep." She rested a hand on his shoulder briefly. "Goodnight."

He reached up to put his hand over hers. "Goodnight." She squeezed his shoulder gently, then headed to her room.


	5. Chapter 5

_I can't imagine._

That was the thing that people said, to parents who had lost children. Other parents said it. And it was a lie. They damn well could imagine. Everyone who ever lost their child in a store, scrambled to get to them after they fell out of a tree, ran to an ER with a high fever, or woke in the middle of the night to make sure their newborn was breathing could _imagine_.

_I am horrified and glad I'm not you,_ would be a more accurate statement. But most people had more tact.

Steve had said it. Probably not entirely consciously. But that was what Clint really meant when he talked about the pity of others. The idea that what happened to you was so awful that people couldn't stand to think about it. 

Still. That was no reason to take it out on Natasha. 

She probably could imagine it, in a way. The kids hadn't been hers, but she had loved them like they were. They'd been the only family she'd ever known, and she'd lost them. Half the reason he'd come out here with her was because she remembered them they way he did.

He found her the next day out in the greenhouse, like usual. Nordic metal was playing on the speakers, because she'd read about some study that said loud music helped plants grow best. Nat was working on the back wall, where she had a little bed of flowers. They weren't edible or practical, but they were beautiful and maybe that was still important.

For a moment he stood behind her. He could tell she knew he was there—you didn't sneak up on Natasha Romanov—but she didn't pause in her planting. Then he said, "I was teaching Lila how to shoot a bow."

Now her hands paused. She was still a moment, then her head tilted. "I saw it. Outside. In the ashes."

"When it started I didn't understand what I was seeing. We'd been out for a picnic, and behind me Laura starts screaming. I turn and Nate is disintegrating in her arms. Then Cooper, then her."

"And Lila holding the bow." She was quiet a moment. "And you spend a moment waiting - hoping - it's going to happen to you too. But it doesn't." She gave him a sad smile. "That's why you weren't using the bow in Japan."

"I haven't touched it since."

She nodded slowly. "I don't think I could, either. In that position."

"The whole thing with Japan and the sword. . . I just wanted something as opposite as possible. From what my life had been."

That actually got a little chuckle out of her. "Well, that certainly was. And I know you were targeting. . . people worthy of death."

He sat down in the dirt where there were no flowers, leaning against the back wall. "You used to say, years ago, that we had to be monsters to do what we do."

"I remembered. You taught me it wasn't true."

"I got to wondering if maybe you'd been right all along. You told me we didn't get to do both." 

"What happened to Laura and the kids had nothing to do with what you did for SHIELD. Or the Avengers."

He tipped his head back and rested it against the wall. "I know. I just figured--the good side of me is gone. The other was all I had left."

"There's still good in you. Lots of it." He looked at her and she gestured to the building around them. "You didn't have to do this for me."

"Maybe I did it for the bananas." He didn't really like bananas. Which she knew. He could see it on her face. So he sighed. "You are the good that I have left."

"Younger me would find that hilarious," she admitted.

He didn't understand what she meant by that, and he could usually read her well. "Why?"

She fiddled with the trowel she'd been using."For a very long time I considered you the only good in me."

"I have never agreed with your self assessments." He smiled. "I admit there is irony in how the tables are turned."

"Maybe. . ." She took a breath. "Maybe we can be each other's good. Be the person the other can depend on."

He watched her hands carefully moving soil. "I think that's already true."

She patted the earth down around the roots of the rose she'd been tending, then looked over at him. "It is."

Looking at her, he felt a sudden rush of affection. It pierced right through the numbness he'd worked so hard to maintain for his own sanity. "I wouldn't have built this thing for anyone else."

Smiling, she tipped her head back to look at it. "I love it. And it has your touch all over it."

"Call it a thank you," he told her.

She looked back at him, brow arched. "For finding you?"

It was so much more complicated "For saving me from myself."

She nodded, as if she understood completely. Maybe she did. "I'm happy to do that any time."

The Asgardians, who were very into ceremonial events, hosted Thanksgiving that year. They took over the hangar and transformed it into a gigantic banquet hall. An elderly woman tracked Clint down and said someone had told her he was the best climber, would he help with the decorations. Which is how he spent two days up in the rafters hanging things.

Holidays were hard. Halloween had been. So was Thanksgiving, Asgardian finery and all. Christmas loomed.

Nat had worried about the babies upsetting him, when he first came. But the truth was, infancy had always been Laura's territory. He provided support and followed orders. The tragedy of living with other people's children didn't really start to hit him until Morgan started walking.

For her birthday, she'd gotten a tiny toddler workbench. Tony had it set up in a pen in his casual workshop--the one next to the house where he worked on things that weren't dangerous. Clint went in there to ask about something for the greenhouse sprinkler system and there she was, in little overalls, banging on a piece of wood with a pink plastic hammer.

She looked over at him when he came in and grinned, waving her hammer. "Unna Cint!"

His throat closed, and it took hims a moment to speak. "Hi, Morgan."

"I bid," she informed him, going back to her banging.

Tony was at his workbench and glanced up. "Hey man, what's up?"

He shoved his hands in his pockets. "You know, my kids could only say like two words at that age."

He glanced over at Morgan. "Yeah. She's . . . advanced. I try to tell Pepper I was too, but she's reading a lot of books anyway."

"The books are wrong as often as they're right."

"I told her that, too." He looked back at what he was tinkering with. "I figure as long as she's happy and meeting her other milestones, a few extra words shouldn't be a problem."

"I don't think anyone would be surprised your daughter is a genius. Any more than they'd be surprised mine can shoot better than-"

Could. Not can, _could_. Past tense.

He didn't have a daughter anymore. His daughter was dead.

Tony glanced at him, clearly catching the word. Clint braced himself for pity. For "I can't imagine."

Instead, Tony looked back to his work. "Well, hell, if you want to make mine a great shot, too, I won't say no. Though you might have to fight Rhodey for the honor."

Clint was grateful the moment almost felt normal. Maybe some day he could talk about them without choking on his grief. "I am the best marksman in the world."

"Let Rhodey down easy, he's very sensitive."

He watched Morgan bang away for a moment, before saying. "I want a wood shop."

This time Tony didn't even look up. "Done. Just tell me where and we'll get it built."

"Since the ground is frozen, I will probably have to cannibalize something. Not that we lack for space around here." He smiled a little. "Thanks, by the way."

He nodded and for a moment Clint thought they were done. Then Tony said, "No one ever knows what to say. Anytime you wanted to be treated like a normal asshole, you know where to find me."

Christmas Eve they had Chinese food. Clint wasn't entirely sure he was going to be able to do the morning thing, but noodles and egg rolls were different enough from his usual holiday experience that it didn't sting. The house was decorated very festively, something that was at least partially Nat's fault. Her taste in the elaborate Christmas decorations was almost assuredly Laura's fault. They didn't exactly teach them about that in the Red Room. In fact he had a distinct memory of her telling him that their Christmas tree was the first Christmas tree she had ever decorated, and then Laura insisted they make popcorn garland, because everyone should know how to make popcorn garland.

Their current tree was an enormous one Thor and some of the other Asgardians had gotten out of the woods. Tony had used the boots from his suit to bring Morgan up and put the star on. She had stayed up well past her bedtime and was probably going to wake her parents at the crack of dawn.

Right now, the building was silent. He had attempted to sleep, but gave up few hours in. Maybe he'd go for a very long jog and "accidentally" miss the present opening.

On his way out, he swung through the living room for his jacket and found Nat sitting cross legged on the floor, surrounded by pre-fab wood and very long directions.

He stopped and stared at her. "What the devil are you making?"

Her hands paused and she sighed. "A play house."

How many things had he built in the middle of the night Christmas Eve? More than he could count. Those might be even more painful memories. There had been Christmas mornings before he was a Dad, but the midnight building was unique. He should just go back to his room, or go out on his run. Yet he found himself asking, "Do you need help?"

She hesitated a moment, which almost certainly meant yes. "No, I'm fine."

He came further into the room. "You can't build things for shit, Natasha."

"That dresser was from IKEA and I was drunk and it held my clothes just fine." She scowled at the instructions. "Mostly."

"All it took was half a roll of tape."

"Well why do we have tape if we're not supposed to use it?"

He crouched down across from. "Come on, let me help."

She glanced at him warily. "I suppose. If you insist."

"I promise not to cry all over your instructions."

Her mouth pursed, and he thought she might be a little annoyed he'd seen right through her. Then she said, "I can't find the piece they insist on calling L."

He scanned them for a minute, then pointed. "Is it that one, if you turn it around?"

She stared at it a moment, then tilted her instructions and scowled. Then she shoved the paper into his hands and got to her feet. "I need vodka."

"Isn't that how you fucked up the dresser?" he called. But he got up and followed her. Because, actually, booze sounded like a great idea.

"I still maintain IKEA fucked up that dresser." She dug in the back of the freezer and pulled out a half full bottle of her favorite brand.

"Okay," he said. "But let's try to make sure this isn't a death trap for the toddlers before we're completely plastered."

"A little danger make them strong," she deadpanned in her most over the top Russian accent.

He laughed, and that made her smile. He didn't do it as often as he used to, so she always looked proud when she managed to make him laugh. "I'll drink to that."

She took a swig, then handed him the bottle as they headed back out to the living room to work on the play house.

*

They got the playhouse built. It even looked structurally sound. "I know why you didn't ask me," Clint said. "Why didn't you ask any of the others for help?"

She shrugged. "I wanted it to be from me. Tony would take over and soup it up. Steve would insist he didn't need any help and shoo me away. It's my present to the kids, I wanted to build it."

"I can understand that." He refilled her shot glass and his.

She gave the house a little affectionate pat before downing her shot. "Thanks for the help. I wouldn't have finished in time without you."

"It felt good to do," he said. "Like a moment of normal, where I was my old self."

That surprised her. She had been trying to avoid anything that might remind him of his old life, because it's what he seemed to like. But maybe the answer was in the opposite. To show him he could still have normal, even now. "You are in your element when you're building."

"I had this conversation with Tony about, well, Dad things." He poured more vodka. "The two of them are just bumbling around sometimes. Him and Steve. And I want to say something. I am the only experienced parent in the building, but. . ." He knocked back his shot. "I'm also not one anymore."

"You're always a parent." She refilled her glass. "There's no word in the English language for it. And especially when it comes to advising them, your experience is still relevant."

"It's painful to talk about, but I think necessary."

"You have to let out the infection."

He held his glass out for her to refill. "I just. . . I miss them."

"I miss them, too," she told him, leaning over to top him off. "Everyday."

Clint leaned back against the couch they were sitting in front of. "I was going hide from the present opening."

That didn't surprise her at all. "Last year wasn't too bad, but Morgan was still pretty larval. This year I imagine there'll be more shrieking." She looked over at him. "They say the first holiday after a loss is the worst. I don't know what you were doing last year, but it probably didn't count."

He picked up the bottle of vodka and shook it. ". . .is what I was doing."

She inclined her head. "I do not judge. We had plenty of days like that in the early months."

"I'm sorry I wasn't here," he said, turning towards her.

She didn't really know what to say to that, so she sipped her vodka and reached for the bottle. "You're here now. I like that."

He reached up and tucked and piece of hair behind her ear. "You're my favorite person to get drunk with."

Smiling, she leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder. "Back at you."

She could feel him nuzzle her hair. There was something intimate and not entirely platonic about it. Or she was just that drunk. "In fact you are my favorite person left alive."

The air suddenly felt heavy. "Is it my sparkling wit?" she teased, trying to ease the tight feeling in her chest.

"It's a lot of things." His voice rumbled when he spoke. She found herself wondering if he always smelled this good, or if it was just right now.

She shifted her hand closer to him, finding his and tangling her fingers with his. "You're my favorite person, too."

He rubbed his thumb along hers. "I'm so tired of grief."

"I'm tired of feeling alone," she said, then closed her eyes, wincing a little. Definitely too much vodka.

"You're not alone," he whispered.

Tightening her hand on his, she lifted her head a little and looked at him. "I know. It just. . . feels lonely sometimes."

"Not tonight," he said, offering that half-smile of his. "It's Christmas." And then he bent his head closer and kissed her.

Nothing had shocked her like that in years. For a moment her instinct was to pull back and ask him what the hell he was doing. Years of pushing down her feelings was hard to suddenly get over. Fortunately, her second instinct was to kiss him back, sliding a hand into his hair.

It was an eternity and an instant before he broke the kiss. "We've had a lot to drink."

Hiding another wince, she started to get up, not wanting to hear his apologies. "We have. I'll just go-"

"Don't."

She froze and took what she hoped was a calming breath. "I don't want you to do anything you don't really want to."

He gave her a look she couldn't read. "When in our entire relationship has anyone ever gotten me to do something I didn't want to do."

Her mouth pursed. "You said we'd been drinking."

"Well, we have," he replied. "I just. . ." He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. "You know what, never mind."

Nat hesitated. She had once made a career out of getting powerful men inebriated enough to carelessly invite her to their hotel room. She had carefully turned down her share of drunk men. Clint was not acting like one of them. He was acting like someone who had taken a leap and was now starting to realize maybe it hadn't been a good idea. And that. . . that was different math entirely.

So she decided to take her own leap, crouching down and cupping his face in her hands before kissing him again. He sighed, a sound she felt as much as heard, and pulled her closer until she fell into his lap. The first kiss had been gentle. The kind you could excuse or forget or blame on the vodka. This wasn't any of those things.

Eventually, they had to part to catch their breath. She nuzzled his jaw, kissing below his ear. "Do you. . . do you want to hide in one of our rooms?"

"Yes," he whispered. "Yours is nicer." They were drunk enough even he was a little unsteady getting up.

"Worse sightlines," she replied, half warning, half teasing.

It response, she got a full grin. "I'm not going to be looking out the windows."

The grin caused and odd, unfamiliar flutter in her chest. "Good," she replied, leading him down the hall to her door.

He held her hand, not making a sound until they got on the other side of her door. It was dark inside, but neither of them turned on the light. Moonlight glinted off the snow outside and that was enough. She closed the door behind her and he pressed her against it, kissing her again. Sighing, she wound her arms around his neck, holding him close.

His hands were on her hips, and both of his thumbs stroked the skin at her waist under the bottom hem of her shirt. It was such a small touch, but she couldn't pay attention to anything else. 

When she couldn't stand it any longer, she let him go and crossed her arms, pulling her shirt up and off. He clearly enjoyed the view, and reached to take her bra off, too. Which proved a little harder than it looked.

She giggled. "Have you had so much to drink you can't master the hooks?"

"Apparently. Probably would be a bad idea to pull my boot knife out."

That sent a little shiver through her. "I mean. . . I have other bras."

"I don't trust my dexterity." But he did take that as an invitation to break the one she was currently wearing.

It fluttered to the floor and he cupped her bare breasts, stroking with rough, callused hands. The touch made a shudder go through her and her breath quicken. He kissed her again, and mumbled, "You are so gorgeous," against her mouth.

She sighed, running her hands down his back and under the hem of his shirt. "Thank you."

He lifted his arms, and let her pull it off. She'd seen him shirtless plenty of times. But this. . . this was different. She traced her fingertips over the lines of the tattoos where it swirled over his chest. "I like this."

"I was drunk when I got the first one. I liked the pain, and kept doing it."

Rubbing her thumb back and forth over one swirl, she looked back up at him and kissed him. He pulled her off the door, backing her towards the bed. He undid the braid in her hair and pulled all the pieces out, sifting his fingers through it gently. She hadn't had much sex that had that kind of care to it. Or any, really.

They moved together, the way they had in the field for years. Sometimes it felt like they could reach each other's minds. It was working here, too. They climbed onto the bed without breaking the kiss, and he leaned her back, spreading her hair out on the pillow. His mouth left hers and moved down her, following the path of his hands. The touch was tortuously light, just enough to turn her on. And he took his time, like he wanted to know every inch of her.

She stroked her hands over him where she could reach. Eventually he moved completely outside of her grasp and she could only clutch the sheets beneath her and arch into him.

She had absolutely no idea where the rest of her clothes had gone, but she was completely naked now. He kissed up the inside of her thigh, his fingers stroking over her sex and making her ache in anticipation. The room spun a little and she lifted her head to watch him, to have something to focus on.

He was so intent on her he didn't notice her looking right away. There was something heady about being the sole focus of his attention. She didn't know that she'd ever been with a man who looked at her that way. Like his whole world was right here. When he looked up and their eyes met, the room spun in and entirely different way. Then he bent his head back down and traced her clit with his tongue.

It was like a live wire going down her spine. She gasped, arching, and she could feel as well as hear the chuckle he gave. He teased her, long slow laps of his tongue that left her panting. He was so good at this, and she got lost in it. It had been so, so long since someone had made her feel good.

When her climax started to build up she almost regretted it. She didn't want the pampering to end. But it grew and grew, until she was shaking and gasping as pleasure filled her.

"That's my girl," he murmured, stroking his hand up her side as she calmed.

She pressed a hand to her belly, where it still ached a bit with pleasure, trying to catch her breath. " _Chjort_."

"You lose your English when you're really drunk, but I'm going to take some of the credit." He was smiling in a way she hadn't seen in so long. When was the last time she'd seen him actually look happy?

She reached for him and he climbed up her, close enough she could wrap her arms around him and draw him down for a kiss. She could taste herself on his tongue. They kissed languidly for a bit, until the heat and urgency began to ratchet back up.

He, annoyingly, still had pants on. At least they were sweat pants and she was limber enough to work them down his legs without breaking the kisses. "That's really fucking hot," he said, hitching up one of her legs to slide inside her.

Her laugh turned into a moan and she dug her nails into his shoulders as he buried himself fully inside her. "Yes," she breathed. He made an indistinct noise of agreement as he started to move.

She was once again amazed at his patience. After all that build up she had rather expected fast and frantic, which would have suited her fine. She was typically a one-and-done sort of girl. Finding herself on another slow, lazy climb to her peak was new and pleasantly surprising.

He kissed her, and sucked on her lower lip as she arched up to meet him. It was exquisite, and intense. Hooking her legs higher pulled her closer to him, stroking at a deeper angle. That was when she closed her eyes, centering he focus on the sensation of him moving insider and the pleasure that caused.

This orgasm started slow, rippling through her in deep pulses. She whimpered, shuddering in his arms as it filled her, clenching her sex around him. "Fuck," he growled, and then she got the fast and hard she'd been expecting, just drag her pleasure out right at the end, like an aftershock. She was still shaking when he finally followed her.

He collapsed down on her and she wrapped her arms around him, pressing little kisses on his jaw. After a moment he rolled off her, sighing like it came from the very bottom of his soul. She reached over and rubbed his arm with her knuckles, smiling. He turned on his side to look at her better. "Hey."

"Hi," she replied softly, feeling oddly shy.

He leaned over to kiss her. "Merry Christmas."

She laughed a little. "Merry Christmas."


	6. Chapter 6

Clint woke up to a pounding headache. And someone pounding on his door. It might have been gentle knocking, but hungover as he was it sounded like a jackhammer. "What do you want?"

There was a pause, then he heard Pepper's surprised voice. "Clint?"

"Yeah?"

"Er. Hm." She cleared her throat. "Is Nat. . .there?"

He opened his eyes. He was in Natasha's room.

She was scrubbing a hand over her face and propping herself up on her other elbow. "What's up, Pepper?" she asked.

"Process of elimination via awkward pantomime indicated that the mystery playhouse was likely your doing." Another pause. "Or. . . both of you? Morgan wanted to say thank you, but I can come back later."

"Yeah, that was us." Apparently, he was being lumped into the gift giving. "We were up late building it. I'll be out in a minute."

"Okay," she said. "Sorry to interrupt. We've got waffles," she added.

"Thanks!" Nat called. They were both quiet, listening to Pepper's foot steps going down the hall. Then Nat looked at him. "You okay? There was a thread of panic in your eyes for a minute there."

Was he okay? That was a million-dollar question right there. He stared at the ceiling. "Are we supposed to feel guilty? Am I?" 

"I don't know." She paused. "I don't. Feel guilty. I feel like I should but I also. . . given the circumstances I don't think she'd be mad."

"She wouldn't. I _know_ she wouldn't." He sat up. "You can't marry someone with as dangerous job as I have without talking about what ifs. When we were setting up the deal for me to join SHIELD, she insisted there be a clause in my contract that she would be promptly told if I was dead. Said she'd need to find a second husband promptly, or she was going to make Fury come drive the combine." He could never entirely tell if Laura was joking. She'd been intensely pragmatic, his wife. 

It had been almost two years since she died. That's almost certainly longer than she'd have ever wanted him to be alone.

Nat smirked a little. "I don't know how much use I am on a combine. But Laura did occasionally express concern without her you'd wear the same t-shirt and jeans until they grew legs. That I can certainly prevent."

"I trust the laundry bot." He turned and looked at her. "I think she'd be glad it was you."

The smirk softened into an honest smile. "Really?"

"Someone she loved and trusted? Yeah."

Nat leaned over and kissed his shoulder. "Then maybe it's okay we don't feel guilty."

Before he could reply, something on a shelf across the room caught his eye. A very familiar stuffed cat. He stared at it, not sure if he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. He stared long enough Nat clearly noticed and followed his gaze.

"Oh," she said softly. "I. . . after I saw everything at the farm I knew I wouldn't be able to go back. So I took somethings. One for each of you. To remember."

He got up to get a better look. "That was Nate's," he said quietly.

"It was." Next to it was a little framed painting, a watercolor of flowers Lila had done. Dangling off the corner of the frame was an NC State keychain, where Cooper had been hoping to go to college. There was a fountain pen from Laura's desk. And his old dog tags. One thing for each of them, just as she'd said. 

He braced a hand on the wall and felt his throat close. For a moment he couldn't breathe. This was all that was left of them. Nearly two years and sometimes he still felt like grief might literally kill him. He wouldn't be able to take it just collapse where he stood.

A hand flattened on his back and Nat tucked herself next to him. "Hey."

He put his hand over his eyes. "Sorry," he managed to choke out.

"It's all right," she said. She slipped in front of him and wrapped her arms around him, tugging his face into her shoulder. "It's okay."

It wasn't and it wouldn't be, but his arms came around her waist and he pulled her as close as he could. She was warm and safe, a present to ground him and a future worth surviving for. She held him close, rocking them a little and stroking his hair. He let himself lean on her. She was solid and steady and would clearly stand there with him as long as he wanted.

Eventually he lifted his head and wiped his eyes. Then he kissed her, for reasons that had nothing to do with sex. She cupped his face, thumbs stroking his cheeks lightly.  
When he lifted his head, she offered him a little smile. "Hi."

"Hi," he replied, trying to return the smile. "I'm glad it's you, too."

"So am I," she said softly.

"You ready to go face Christmas morning." He paused. "And whatever faces our teammates will be making. I assume they will be legion."

She laughed and slipped her hand into his. "I think we can handle it."

They were still making waffles—there were a lot of people—and they were scattered from the living room by the tree, through the dining area into the kitchen. And every last one of them, from Steve crouched by the playhouse to Rhodey manning the waffle maker, stopped talking and turned to look at Nat and Clint.

He briefly considered escaping back to the bedroom. Then Nat gave his hand a little squeeze and aimed for the playhouse. "Can Morgan come out and play?"

She burst out of the playhouse and tackled Nat around the knees. "I love it!"

Clint watched her pick the little girl up and toss her for a moment, before walking to the kitchen. He had a hangover and he needed coffee bad enough to face the peanut gallery.

Rhodey had gone back to waffles and seemed to have decided to stay the hell out of it. The rest of the waited for him to pour his coffee and have a couple sips before Stark offered, "I don't know if congratulations is the right word, but it feels the closest."

Clint sighed. "Is it necessary that we discuss it?"

"No," Rhodey said before Stark could open his mouth. "We do not need to discuss your personal life."

Stark held up his hands. "It just seemed like someone had to say something before the awkwardness got terminal."

"No, that's just you."

"You should be in a better mood considering you spent last night-"

"Tony!" 

Clint didn't know if Pepper had just heard the conversation or if Nat had sent her over to rescue him, but Clint left her to wrangle her husband and took his coffee over to the dining room table, where a group of them were playing some sort of strange looking board game that must have been someone's Christmas present. He wanted to go over and sit by Nat, but he now felt like that would be uncomfortably conspicuous.

He watched the game with one eye and watched Nat with the other. She was gamely letting Morgan give her a tour of the play house, including listening to the doorbell and turning the handles on the fake sink. She'd probably demure if anyone said so, but she was very good with children. She'd always been good with his. He was glad she got to be an Auntie again.

Someone brought him a waffle, and second cup of coffee. The game was incomprehensible because it was from another planet, and it kept stopping so Valkyrie and Rocket could argue over what it's actual rules were. Their arguments were punctuated by Steve or Pepper trying to get one or both of them to stop cursing. 

Nat slid into the seat next to him, bracing a hand on his shoulder as she did so. She seemed to have acquired her own waffle and coffee.

He turned and looked at her. "I see the playhouse is a hit."

She nodded, sipping her coffee. "Not everyday you get to impress Tony Stark's daughter."

Clint drank his own coffee before asking, "Did you get commentary?"

"No, Steve and Pepper have restraint. Though it's possible the collected girls will pounce me later."

"I was congratulated."

Nat chuckled. "Well. . . I am pretty hot."

"You are," he said. She grinned at him and he decided in that instant that he didn't care about commentary, so he leaned over and kissed her.

Behind him, there was clapping.

They broke the kiss and Nat rested her forehead on his. "Our friends are idiots."

"Yeah, but they're our idiots."

"Does that mean we're stuck with them?"

"Probably." He turned back to his waffle, and she to hers. Thor, who was sitting on his other side, patted him on the back so hard he coughed.

The rest of the morning passed by lazily. The kids had their naps and the adults exchanged their own gifts. In the afternoon Nat retreated to the kitchen with some of the others to make a fancy Christmas dinner, starring quite a few of the vegetables from the greenhouse.

He'd dreaded today, more than he could articulate. And the ache was still there. Probably it always would be. But by the time they sat down for the meal, he was really, genuinely happy to be there.

Stark made a toast, because he loved the sound of his own voice. James passed out in his mashed potatoes halfway through. Dessert was a pie that Nat had made, apparently, that was delicious and buttery.

The parents took the kids to bed and turned in early, and the others slowly peeled off. Until it was just him and Nat, tucked on the couch and drinking coffee, watching the snow fall outside. He held out his arm and she snuggled up against him and it felt so blissfully normal. "Merry Christmas, Nat."

"Merry Christmas, Clint." She rubbed his stomach. "You all right?"

"Far more than I expected to be. And that's mostly your doing."

She sighed softly, cuddling into him. "It was a good day. Our tribe of idiots are pretty nice."

He sifted his fingers through her hair. "Would you like to come back to my room tonight?"

"I'd love to," she said softly.

"Come on," he said, standing up and holding out his hand.

*

The morning after Christmas, Nat woke up in Clint's bed. The morning before had been rushed and a little stressful, what with the audience waiting outside. Nobody got up early on December 26, so they had time to just lay.

He really did have the nicest view in the house. It was even better cuddled into his side, listening to his heartbeat.

"Should we have a conversation about this?" he asked quietly, rubbing his hand over her back.

"Mmm." She relaxed into the back rub a moment. "We can, if you want."

"I don't know. I suppose it just feels like we should. This is. . .not casual."

It was a relief to hear him say it. Though she'd figured it was true. "I've never had anything not casual."

"Last time I had something casual was twenty years ago."

"You should be really good at this, then."

"We have a lot of history. I suppose that colors things."

"We have already done a lot of the early dating steps. I know all the basic stuff. Your favorite color is eggplant, you drink your coffee black, your shots pull a little to the left when you're tired."

"That last part is a state secret."

"Mmm." She ran her foot up his leg. "It dies with me."

"This is. . .new. You're different, and god knows I'm different. I haven't been quietly lusting after you all these years or anything."

"I didn't think you were." He had never, in all their years in the field, ever given even a whiff of attraction to her. "Though, if we're being honest, and having this conversation, I nursed a crush on you for a long time."

"You certainly hid that well." She could hear the surprise in his voice.

"Well, for a while I didn't really know what it was. Then I met your family and buried it even deeper."

"I do remember when I first told you about them, you were really mad at me, and I was afraid it was because you thought something was happening. But it was just remnants of the Red Room fucking with your head."

"I remember." She sighed, pressing closer to breath in his scent. "It took a very long time to get those thoughts out of my head. Sometimes I wonder if I ever really did."

"I wondered a lot that first year if you'd been right all along. And that this was some kind of divine punishment, for daring to be an assassin who had normal life."

She lifted her head to look at him. "Do you believe in divine punishment?"

"Not usually, but after what happened, you start to question."

"Fair point." She had watched Thanos snap his fingers, so at least she had had some context for people disappearing. To the rest of the world it had been a normal day. "What do you think now?"

"The universe is random chaos, and sometimes chaos sucks." He looked down at her. "And sometimes it surprises you with good."

She smiled. "Sounds about right." She leaned up to kiss him.

It was a snowy winter. Colder and darker with worse weather than the one before. Nat would have found it even more depressing than last winter, if she didn't have Clint to keep her warm. They kept having to go out every time there was a storm and rescue people. The Asgardians were handy then—they were cold weather people.

There was an ice storm in February that hit most of New England. The need was so great, they'd been asked to send everyone, even those who were not fans of winter weather.

Still, she was very surprised to find Clint gearing up with everyone else.

"You're coming?" she asked quietly, wandering closer to him as she fidgeted on her gloves.

He offered her half a smile. "Seems a worthy cause."

Smiling in return, she nodded. "It'll be nice to have you on my six again."

He put his hand over his heart. "I promise to save you from all falling icicles."

She kissed his cheek, heading out to the hanger. "My hero."

As it turned out, he didn't need to save her from ice or anything else, but she loved having his company. And when then got home, cold and damp and windburned, they left their gear in a messy pile dripping slush on the carpet of his room and he pulled her into his shower. 

It was a hell of a way to warm up.

Later, after mostly drying off and collapsing into his bed, she asked, "Are all relationships friends who have sex?" 

Clint chuckled. "I mean, more or less, yeah."

"I always figured it was more complicated." Normally, she'd have felt vaguely self conscious about her lack of experience in this area. But Clint didn't seem to mind the questions.

He shrugged. "Maybe it is for some people. I think Tony and Pepper are as complicated as a Russian novel."

They were one of the few couples she knew intimately. "As long as we're not missing out on anything."

Something crossed his face. It was brief, gone so fast most people would have missed it, particularly because he was the king of the micro-expression. But she knew him and his faces as well as anyone on this earth. "Unless you consider yelling something worth missing, no."

"I don't like yelling." Though, neither of them were really yellers. Nor did they argue much. Possibly, she realized, because they both held onto thoughts that might upset the other. Which likely explained the little flash she'd seen.

"We've got time to figure out how we work," he told her.

"I know." She ran her fingers along the swirls of his tattoo. "But we're working so far, right?"

He leaned over to kiss her. "We absolutely are."

Reassured, she resettled her head on his shoulder, letting her eyes drift shut.

When spring came, they planted the outdoor garden. It was so big it was a group effort now. Tony decided to put in a pool, and they squabbled about how far she needed it to be from any of her crops. Carol was visiting, and she blasted out the dirt for the hole, and Clint complained he'd wanted to drive the backhoe.

With the heavy construction going on at the pool, the kids started spending time underfoot as she worked in the garden. Morgan was big and smart enough she was somewhat helpful, but James mostly just like getting muddy and giggling gleefully.

Nat was showing Morgan how to replant a seedling when she heard the giggling joined by Clint laughing. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw a very dirty James dancing around as Clint sprayed him with the hose. He was grinning in a way she rarely saw and it pinched something in her heart. Suddenly, she understood what that unspoken thought had been.

He knew she couldn't have children. Knew her complicated feelings about it, how it was all tangled up in the messy stuff in her head. He would swallow that thought for the rest of his life if he had to. But he missed being a father.

The winter before, as part of their attempts to keep busy while they were all snowed in, Nat had taught the other women to knit. Well, Nebula had declined, and Rocket joined originally—though eventually he decided it was too much estrogen, and fled. Though they were all usually too busy in the warm months, every so often they made time for what Pepper called the Stitch and Bitch. Particularly since she and Clint had started a relationship and her friends talking about _theirs_ no longer made her ache a little.

There was deep irony to the fact that conversation managed to wander onto the one topic that was still raw.

"Nope. Birth control is unheard of. Babies happen when they happen. We're long lived and it's rare, so. . ." Valkyrie shrugged. Someone in the Asgardian villiage was pregnant, and so now she was explaining Asgardian reproduction.

"I think the anxiety would kill me if we did it that way," Sharon said.

"If we did it that way, you'd have 19 kids that fundy family," Carol said dryly.

Sharon made a face at her, but admitted, "We are discussing number two already. Steve will happily have as many as I'm willing to spit out and I sort of want to get the baby/toddler part of the way while I'm young."

"I looked into it," Pepper said. "If a second was even medically possible. The answer was a very definitive _no_. Morgan was a miracle."

"She's an adorable miracle," Sharon assured her.

"Do you really want a second one?" Carol joked. "How many little Starks do we need?"

"Two of them would probably conspire, and it would be terrifying." Pepper shrugged. "We're both only children. Siblings always sounded like fun. And early on Tony had a thing about having multiple children being some sort of hedge in case something happens to one of them. Because that's the way his mind works."

That caught Nat's attention, even though she'd been mostly trying to tune them out. "Can I ask a terrible question?"

Pepper turned to look at her, setting her needles down. "Was it Clint who disabused him of that notion? Yes."

"No. Well, yes, I would hope so. But what I wanted to ask is. . . if something happened, and you could have another child. . . would you?"

"If I could? Yes." She paused, considering. "I would put far more effort into it than I even thought about doing for a second. Treatments, donor eggs, adoption. Tony and I would have been fine having no children. Morgan was an absolute accident. But now that we are parents, to suddenly _not_ be. . ." She looked at Sharon for help, apparently that sure the other woman felt the same.

"I'd stop at nothing," she confirmed. "For my own sanity and because I honestly don't think Steve would survive it." She looked over at Nat. "Has Clint-?"

She shook her head. "He hasn't said anything. He knows what the Red Room did to me. But. . . I think he wants to."

"I believe that," Pepper said. "Based on some things Tony has said."

Nat sighed softly, thinking about it. "Pepper? Could you get me an appointment with your OB?"

Two days later, Pepper brought her a note with her appointment info. "So, this isn't actually my OB. This is the fertility specialist we saw about the sibling. You want a full workup to know where you stand." 

"Thank you," she replied, taking it.

"And listen. . . I know this isn't just for him. I know how deeply you grieved them." Those first weeks and months had been unfathomably dark, and she and Pepper had spent a lot of time sobbing together. It was their little secret, two women with steel spines letting each other break without judgement. They'd kept each other going in a way none of the men could have. None of them were ever going to hold Pepper's hair while she had morning sickness or Nat's when she finally found out just how much alcohol it took to get her blackout drunk. 

Nat knew it was that, all of that, prompting what Pepper said next. "My eggs are toast but my uterus worked great. If yours doesn't work, mine does and I'll give you the first one free."

She smiled. "Sharon made the same offer. Including informing me Steve could wait to repopulate the earth till I was done." She really did have the best friends on the planet. "Maybe we'll impregnate you both and have twins."

"Hers _is_ a younger model," Pepper said.

"It's true. And it's carried a super baby. Maybe there's some magic left over."

The next Wednesday, she made her excuses and went into town to see the doctor. She was a pretty brunette woman with an easy smile. She did look a little flustered when she saw Nat. "What can I do for you, Ms. Romanov?"

"Do you know who I am?"

The doctor smiled and took a seat. "I own a television."

Nat nodded, feeling stupidly nervous. "When I was sixteen the Russian government sterilized me. I don't know, exactly, what they did. I'd like to know if it's possible for me to have or carry children."

Whatever the other woman had been expecting, that wasn't it. "Okay. Do you have periods?"

"Yes. Regularly."

"Great." She clapped her hands together and stood. "Hop on the table and let's see what we have."


	7. Chapter 7

The filling of the swimming pool was a cause for great ceremony, and everyone came out to watch. Tony had hooked a firehose right into the mains, and water gushed out at impressive speed.

It was not at all warm enough outside to be swimming. The heating system was not fully operating, but it ended up not mattering. They had someone who could—apparently—heat 20,000 gallons of water with her fists. Tony was put out he didn't even have time to go get any gadgets. "You're kind of a _deus ex machina_ sometimes, you know that, Danvers?"

Clint really enjoyed swimming in what was now a gigantic hot tub.

Nat had gone into the closest city to run errands and didn't get back until close to dinner time. Everyone else had gone in, but he was still enjoying the pool. Even more now that he could float in peace. He saw her come to the edge and crouch to dip a hand in the water. "Like a hot spring."

"Tony has wired the heating system to an arc reactor. But apparently Carol could boil it if needs be." He looked up at her. "Wanna come in?"

She tilted her head, considering. She looked a little. . . off, in a way he couldn't put a name to. "I'll have to get my suit. Not sure it's skinny dipping weather."

He swam over to her, holding on to the edge. "You okay, Tasha?" They had their nicknames they only used when the conversation had weight. He didn't even know what this one was about, but he could feel it.

He could hear her take a deep breath, but she seemed steady when she met his gaze. "I have something I'd like to talk about."

Yeah, this was serious. "You wanna go inside?" She nodded and he braced his hands on the edge of the pool, boosting himself out of the water. 

They went right to their room and he sat on the edge of the bed with her, unconcerned about getting the cover wet.

Nat slipped a hand into his and took another of those deep breaths. "I didn't run errands today. I went to the doctor."

He stared at her, the world shifting on its axis. People talked about the doctor with this kind of gravity when they were dying. "You're sick." 

God, he couldn't lose her. Not after everything else he'd lost. He wouldn't survive.

Her eyes widened and she waved a hand. "No! No, no! I'm fine, I'm not sick. I'm actually better than I thought. I-" She rubbed her forehead. "Okay. I saw a fertility doctor. She ran some scans and did an ultra sound. When the Red Room sterilized me, they removed my fallopian tubes, but they left my uterus and ovaries intact. And some preliminary blood work indicates my hormone levels are perfect. So. If we wanted to. We could have babies. With a lot less intervention than I expected."

He stared at her dumbly, because his brain was having trouble with the whiplash. So he just echoed, "Intervention?"

"Yeah. Um, the way she described it, since I have normal cycles, they would put me on a light dose of hormones to encourage more eggs to be released. I'd need to be under anesthesia for them to collect those. Then, they could probably fertilize them and implant them on the same cycle. I'd be on some hormones until we got a positive pregnancy test, then it could progress like a normal pregnancy." She paused. "You will need to jerk off in a cup."

The solemn way she said that surprised a laugh out of him. It was almost a hysterical laugh, and he could feel tears in his eyes. Relief and surprise and fear and the sharpest, most poignant kind of hope. "Honey, for that I'd jerk off on the lawn."

She smiled and he saw her eyes were a little watery as well. "I love you," she said softly. "I know if I'd asked you, you'd have said you didn't want it, or you wanted me more, or something. But I know you miss having kids. And I would really like to be a mom."

"It's not replacing them," he said. "I mean I'm not. . ." He did not know how to get the thoughts in his head out of his mouth. The emotional punch of this made him dizzy and off-balance. "We're alive. I want us to live. I'd love to have babies with you."

The smile turned into a grin and she reached out and wrapped her arms around him.

For some reason, he imagined it would take a long time. Whenever you heard anything about IVF, it sounded like a long miserable slog. They filled the pool the week before Memorial Day. In June, there was a bunch of testing, including his aforementioned date with a cup. He had to do it again July, while Nat was under anesthesia for her egg retrieval. In August, they lined up a row of pregnancy tests on the counter and stared at them. The Tuesday after labor day, the thump of their baby's heartbeat filled the little exam room where they had the ultrasound. 

It was the first time he'd ever seen Nat cry out of joy.

Laura's pregnancies had had their complications. She'd flirted with high blood pressure at the end of Cooper's and the first trimester with Lila had been full of weird cravings and morning sickness. He'd heard horror stories of Pepper's early pregnancy. Nat had never known her mother or any pregnancy stories she might have, so they had no idea what to expect from her.

She was, to the irritation of the other women, one of those people who absolutely glowed. She didn't have a moment of nausea, slept well, and didn't swell or bloat in any of the usual spots. By Thanksgiving, she had a perfect little bump under her sweaters and looked completely normal from the back. In the middle of putting together a tricycle for Morgan's birthday, she grabbed his hand and held it to said bump, just in time for him to feel a little jab in the center of his palm.

"Well, that's your kid alright," he said, in absolute awe.

She was beaming. "What do you think, kick or punch?"

"Oh, headbutt at the least." He'd wanted to be surprised by the gender. She'd been so surprised by his request that she'd agreed, though he could tell she kind of wanted to know.

Christmas turned into an unofficial baby shower, as every gift they received was really for the baby. Stark built them a hovering, self rocking cradle. The rest of them provided clothes, blankets, carriers and toys. Somehow, Sharon had found a stuffed black widow spider which made Nat laugh out loud.

Steve had a present for them that he appeared particularly nervous about, enough it made Clint a little wary. He understood why the minute he tore off the paper. It was a frame with four pictures. One Cooper, one Lila, one Nate, and the most recent ultrasound photo of the baby.

Abandoned and unattended, his house at the farm had burned down sometime during the year he was in Japan. He wasn't and never had been sentimental about stuff, but he desperately missed the photos.

Because he'd so aggressively kept his family off the grid, the only pictures he'd had were physical. The only pictures he had now were a few grainy cellphone shots Nat had scavenged from Tony's backups of her old phone.

But here they were. His children. _All_ of them. "How. . .?"

"In one of the storage spaces, there are a bunch of crates of stuff that came up here from the Tower. I was in there looking for something and I came across a box with some of your old bows. I remembered you kept pictures rolled up inside the handle, and. . ." He gestured and shrugged.

Clint just nodded, pretty sure he was going to cry if he opened his mouth.

Nat put a hand on his back, rubbing in circles. "Thank you, Steve. It's beautiful."

They hung the frame on the wall in their room. He'd long moved into her room, despite its inferior sightlines, because it was bigger. The nursery was set up in his old room. Nat's bump grew bigger, until he could actually see the baby moving around. "It's like _Alien_."

"That doesn't give me a lot of relaxing feelings regarding the birth," she told him dryly.

He rubbed one of the moving lumps, and felt the little kick back. "Be nice to your Mama."

In response, he got three rapid kicks back. Nat groaned. "Maybe don't help."

Chuckling, he bent his head down closer. "I can't wait to meet you."

January and February proved cold, but not as cold as the year before. Nat eventually got too big and tired to work much in the garden, so Clint and the others pitched in to help. She was so little, once her third trimester was underway she looked more baby than body. She had to eat lots of little meals and lived mostly on the melons she'd originally grown for Pepper.

Clint and Bruce did most of the seedlings around the time of the thaw, while she supervised from a chair. As soon as the temperature got warm enough there wasn't actively frost on the ground, he cranked up the heat in the pool so Nat could float in the warm water and take pressure off her back. She was due any day now, and miserable.

"I was thinking," he said as she floated.

"What about?" she asked, not lifting her head.

He watched her a moment. "I'd like to get married. What do you think?"

She didn't answer immediately, then he saw her smile a little. "I have no objections."

He returned a full grin, because it made him happy. "Before or after?"

"Unless you have a justice of the peace in your pocket, I think it'll have to be after."

"New York only has a 24 hours waiting period," he said. "We've got time."

"Not really, I've been having contractions for a few hours now."

*

When Morgan Stark and Jamie Rogers had been born, the whole lot of them had collected in the waiting room, fretting like a big group of nervous hens. During one of them Thor had gotten into a loud argument with hospital security about how Rocket did not violate the hospital's No Pets policy. The waiting had been interminable. Pepper had been in labor for 22 hours, and Sharon 14. (Nat had waited through two of Laura's deliveries as well--and they were also long and also interminable.)

They'd packed in the cars and followed her and Clint—Steve was driving—to the hospital. Clearly planning had gone into this one. People brought stuff to do, and were already taking a dinner order when the nurses took Nat back.

"They're setting up base camp out there," Clint commented.

"Your friends probably should have waited for us to check you," the nurse said. "We'll see, but I'm not sure that you'll be staying."

"Are you implying I'm not in labor?" Nat asked her.

"False labor is very common in first time mothers, or you just may be very early." She paused. "You just don't seem like a woman in active labor."

Nat squinted at her and she could see Clint trying to hide a smirk. Deciding the woman wasn't worth arguing with, she simply said, "I look forward to your apology later," and laid back to wait for her doctor.

"You probably should have been less honest about the pain scale," Clint commented.

"If ten is the worst pain I can imagine, then this is a two." The Red Room had been very creative, and very specific, about the torture methods they taught her. The human body's capacity for pain was enormous.

He started to laugh, and then said, "You know, Laura said the same thing. 'I imagine horrifying things for a living, Clint.' Doctor comes in and she's talking about disemboweling in between screaming through contractions." Nat had noticed, lately, that he could tell stories about them without becoming immediately shadowed in grief.

She paused the breathe through the latest contraction. "Asking someone who has been shot multiple times to rate their pain is pointless unless the asker has also been shot." The next contraction was already building and she blew out a breath. "Unless you want to catch this baby, I suggest you go find my doctor."

Even Clint looked a bit skeptical, but he did as she asked.

He returned a few minutes later, with her doctor in tow. "I hear someone is a little impatient," she said, snapping on a pair of gloves and getting in place at the end of the bed to check her.

Nat wasn't sure if she was referring to the baby or Nat herself, but she said, "The nurse didn't believe I was in labor."

"Well false labor is common and first babies are usually-" She paused, two fingers inside Nat to check her cervix. Her expression went from pleasantly calm to confused to vaguely exasperated. "How long have you been feeling contractions?"

"About four or five hours."

She made another face. "Oh, you're one of _those_." She removed her hand and snapped the gloves off. "You're fully dilated and effaced. If you'd waited any longer you'd have had the baby in the car."

"Are you kidding?" Clint asked, coming over to the bed.

"Not in the least." She rolled her stool over to the wall to call for nurses. "Admittedly. . .I know this is your first, but this is not how births usually go."

"This is my fourth," Clint said. "None of the others went like this."

Nat was in the middle of a contraction with a tremendous urge to push, so she was not available to mediate what might be an awkward moment. She missed some part of what was said, but as it receded she could see her doctor's sad mouth twist before she said, "Mine, too." 

Clint came to her side and she felt his hand on her back. People and equipment came into the room, but she was so focused, she didn't really care. "Push at your leisure," the doctor said.

"Oh, thank God," she muttered under her breath. The next contraction built and she breathed with it, then started to push as it crested. Someone was counting down from ten, and she assumed she was supposed to push until they were done. It was something to focus on, so she did so. The next pain came almost immediately and she repeated the breathing and the pushing, this time making a sound in her throat that was almost a growl.

"One more, one more."

She'd better mean that. Nat would hate to have to kill her doctor with her toes. She felt Clint press a little kiss to her temple and she huffed out her appreciation before bending forward and pushing again. 

Oh, that hurt. That hurt a lot. Then the pressure gave way, and took the pain with it, leaving her with a rush of endorphins. And the sound of a baby crying.

"It's a girl," Clint said, his voice breaking.

Nat sagged back on the bed, breathing hard. The doctor and nurses fussed a moment, then placed the shrieking little girl on her chest, covering them both with a warm blanket.

Wrapping her hands over her daughter, she laughed and cried at the same time. "Hey. Hey. It's okay. Shhh."

Clint sat on the edge of the bed next to Nat. "Look at her."

"Red hair," she said triumphantly, nodded at the thatch of deep auburn curls.

"She's perfect. You were amazing." He put his hand on the baby's back. "Hello, Tatania."

She had stopped her crying and was now opening and closing her mouth, squinting blearily in the light. Nat rubbed her back and leaned her head on Clint's shoulder. "I love you."

He wrapped his arms around both of them. "I love you, too. So much."

Sighing, she closed her eyes and just enjoyed the moment. Their first moment together as a family.

*

It was a very unpleasant mission. The kind where those of them who fought on the ground had to change on the jet and hose the blood off their gear. Nobody liked that kind of body count, but a lot go megalomaniacal assholes had emerged in the chaos after the snap, and they were _still_ cleaning it up. It would probably be the Avengers' job as long as someone could carry a weapon.

There was a certain amount of penance to it. The flight home still felt a little grim.

Because they had the luxury of plenty of people, they had a rule that none of the parents went on the same mission—in case the worst happened. Natasha was on this mission, as was Steve.

The jet set down on the landing pad, and the back gate dropped. Clint was on the grass waiting, trying to keep a grip on Tatania while she desperately tried to get out of his arms. As soon as the engines went off, he put her down and she came flying across the lawn. "Mommy! Mommy!"

Nat crouched and caught her, scooping her up without breaking stride. "There's my little dumpling. How are you? Were you good for Papa?"

"I missed you. I had cookies."

"Cookies are the best." She kissed her cheek, heading over to Clint. "I missed you too. Both of you."

He reached out an arm for her. Them. "How was the op?"

"Bloody. Grimy." She leaned into him, sighing when his arm wrapped around her. "Over."

Clint kissed her temple. "We're very glad you're home."

"Me too." She hefted Tati higher on her hip. "What's for dinner?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. . . we'll be doing an Endgame story in this Universe after all. Stand by.


End file.
